It’s not often that litigators from Boies, Schiller & Flexner and Reed Smith go to battle over less than $3 million. But a peculiar lawsuit involving a fake semiconductor company CEO and Chinese wire transfers executed by Bank of America has the two firms duking it out in Manhattan federal court.
The story begins late last year, when an executive at Besi North America Inc., a subsidiary of Dutch semiconductor company BE Semiconductor Industries N.V., received a call from someone pretending to be the company’s CEO. According to court papers, the impostor successfully snookered both Besi’s vice president of finance and his assistant, who proceeded to wire nearly $2.7 million to accounts in China in a series of transfers. Whoops.
