Galveston County judge calls on 2 officials to resign after scammers steal $500K from county
Galveston County Judge Mark Henry on Monday called on the county's auditor and purchasing agent to resign, blaming them for the theft by cyber scammers of more than $500,000 from the county earlier this year.
At a county commissioners meeting Monday, Henry said County Auditor Randall Rice and County Purchasing Agent Rufus Crowder should be held responsible for the June discovery of a wrongful electronic payment of $525,282.39 to a scammer posing as a county contractor. The scammer was pretending to represent Lucas Construction Co., a Houston company doing road work for the county. The cyber thief has not been caught and the lost funds have not been recovered.
While the stolen funds are a tiny fraction of Galveston County's $149 million budget, similar cyber attacks have raised the alarm in other Texas localities, including in Harris County, where $888,000 was nearly stolen by a person posing as an accountant with a Hurricane Harvey contractor. The city of El Paso was also robbed of $3 million in 2016 from a phony vendor.
Henry, in holding Rice and Crowder responsible for the scam, compared their lack of oversight to a person foregoing their tax payments. He noted that tax offenders typically suffer punishment, including the loss of their home.
Read more: https://www.chron.com/neighborhood/galveston/article/Galveston-County-judge-calls-on-county-auditor-13472649.php
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