GALVESTON - The check is in the mail. That’s the answer Lucas Construction got when they asked Galveston County when they were going to get paid.
The company was owed more than a half million dollars.
“It’s a huge amount of money, obviously. The contractors were waiting to get paid,” said Leno Rios, Lucas’s financial controller.
Rios said the company was owed nearly $526,000 for doing street repairs in San Leon. The company was waiting more than a week for the money to be deposited, which Rios says is out of character.
“The County is always very prompt with their payment,” Rios said.
The delay prompted Rios to call the County Commissioner on Friday to ask about the hold-up was. The Commissioner then notified County Treasurer Kevin Walsh, who contacted the construction company.
“We were telling them, you’re receiving emails that aren’t from Galveston County and we had emails that were not them,” Walsh said.
The Galveston County Sheriff’s Office is now investigating who the scammer was behind these phony emails.
Walsh said an email sender, pretending to be Lucas Construction, recently asked the County to deposit the check into a different account. The County did deposit the check into the new account, without knowing the huge sum was going to the wrong account.
“I feel very violated. The public trust has been violated," Walsh told KHOU. "These are taxpayer dollars. We are ultimately responsible for properly handling of taxpayer dollars and we did not live up to that responsibility."
Walsh said during the same time the County was depositing money to the wrong account, Lucas received messages from a fake County email address, saying the money owed was on its way.
County officials say at this point there’s no evidence that County computers were hacked. Although it’s still a mystery who was behind the scam, Walsh blames the bank, in part. He declined to identify the bank where the money was sent. “The bank that the money went to, had or should’ve known that there was fraudulent activity going on in that account,” Walsh states.
The County is using reserve funds to reimburse Lucas. The check will be hand-delivered.
The County Commissioner did not return our calls for a comment, nor did the County Judge or the County Auditor.
Meanwhile, County officials are looking into how it fell for the scam and what protections can be put into place, to prevent it from happening again.