Scammers posing as B.L. Harbert divert $14.7 million arena payment from Mobile, Alabama

The city's executive director of finance told the City Council on Oct. 27 that someone claiming to represent B.L. Harbert contacted the Finance Department in late May about the company's banking information. Over the following months the impostor won the trust of employees by email and phone, city officials said, and eventually got one of them to send over a genuine Harbert invoice. That invoice, the finance director said, is what carried the change past supervisors' reviews.

The money went out Oct. 2 as the arena's regular monthly payment, which the finance director said had run without trouble for 18 months. Harbert asked about the missing payment on Oct. 7 and again on Oct. 13, and on Oct. 16 the finance office confirmed the money was gone. Mayor Spiro Cheriogotis fired one employee and put two on leave. The city has notified the FBI and the Secret Service, NBC 15 reported. Harbert was paid out of a $15 million owner's contingency in the arena budget. Because the arena is financed with bonds, the city confirmed an NBC 15 estimate that the loss works out to about $22.2 million in bond payments spread across 20 years.

How the impostors got in is still unknown. The mayor said the loss did not come from an employee clicking a bad link. Darren Mott, a retired FBI supervisory agent, told FOX10 that months of groundwork point to an organized group and that Harbert's own email may have been taken over, with mailbox rules hiding the city's messages from the real employee. A Harbert executive did not return FOX10's call, and the mayor would not say whether "partner agencies" had been compromised.

Cheriogotis said changing a vendor's bank details will now be deliberately cumbersome and that payments over $1 million will be hand-delivered rather than wired. He also disclosed an attempt in August that staff caught within two days, and the city recovered that money. The council has scheduled Finance Committee meetings in November and will vote on a panel of outside experts, including accountants.