Wire Fraud

As a crime it dates from the US wire fraud statute of 1952, passed by Congress to cover telegraph, telephone, radio and TV swindles; the first notorious cases were mid-century telephone boiler rooms, and the modern email form (BEC) was first tracked by the FBI in 2013.

Wire fraud is a legal category rather than a single trick: it grew out of the US Mail Fraud Statute of 1872, and in 1952 Congress added a wire fraud law (18 U.S.C. 1343) covering schemes run over telegraph, telephone, radio or TV. As business moved to fax, email and online banking, the law came to cover most modern frauds, and prosecutors use it in cases from Ponzi schemes to crypto. The most common modern form is business email compromise (BEC), which the FBI began tracking in 2013: criminals impersonate executives, suppliers or lawyers to redirect bank transfers. Real-estate closing scams and fake 'change of bank details' requests are now routine versions.

The criminal gets a victim to send money by bank transfer under false pretences. In business email compromise, they hack or spoof an email account belonging to a boss, supplier or lawyer and send a convincing request to pay an invoice or deposit into a 'new' account. Because bank transfers settle fast and are hard to reverse, the money is usually moved on through mule accounts within hours.

It is less a trick than the legal wrapper for almost every modern fraud, which is why US prosecutors reach for it in cases from FTX to Theranos: any scheme that touches an email, phone call or bank transfer qualifies. For criminals it is the route to the biggest sums, since businesses move millions by wire and a redirected payment is gone in hours. Prosecution is straightforward once a suspect is in US custody, with a 20-year maximum per count, but most BEC operators are abroad.

Business email compromise, the main modern form, cost US victims $3.04 billion in 2025 and $55 billion worldwide over 2013-2023 (FBI IC3). The largest wire-fraud convictions include Sam Bankman-Fried, whose FTX customers lost about $8 billion (US DOJ, 2024), and Rimasauskas's $121 million fake-invoice scheme against Google and Facebook. Victims range from home buyers who lose closing deposits to companies that dismiss staff after a single transfer.