March 16, 2026
Colin Zick, partner and co‑chair of the firm’s Privacy and Data Security Practice, and co‑counsel Nicholas Rosenberg of Gardner Rosenberg, secured a significant victory in federal court on behalf of a New Jersey businessman whose earnout payment had been intercepted in an email‑hacking scheme and routed overseas. Following a bench trial, the court entered a $208,951.98 judgment, plus 12% prejudgment interest, after finding a Massachusetts intermediary liable for conversion for forwarding the misdirected funds to a China‑based fraudster. The decision is legally significant because it found a U.S.-based individual liable for the loss; this individual played no role in the interception of the funds but helped transfer the illegally-obtained funds to the fraudulent Chinese entity that was masterminding the scheme.
The case arose after hackers infiltrated the client’s business email and issued falsified wire instructions that redirected a substantial earnout payment to an account controlled by the defendant. As often happens in a business email compromise case, the funds were quickly transferred abroad and could not be recovered. However, Zick and Rosenberg demonstrated that the defendant was an intermediary who exercised wrongful control over money that was not his to receive or disburse, establishing liability even where the primary perpetrators remained outside the reach of U.S. courts.
At trial, the evidence highlighted numerous red flags the intermediary received when he was setting up a dedicated LLC and bank account, accepting the diverted funds, and forwarding them overseas to a party he did not know.
This outcome of this case underscores that civil remedies are available to victims of increasingly common business‑email compromise schemes even where international actors cannot be reached.
