Bleichen Chemical Company announced today that three 1-ton chlorine cylinders had been stolen from the company by fraud. “As a result of a business email compromise fraud, unknown parties set up a water treatment account with our company for chlorine supply at an abandoned water treatment plant on the East Side of Delano.” Carl Scheele, the Bleichen Delano Plant Manager told reporters this morning; “We made two deliveries over a three-week period and had a third order loaded on a truck when the FBI notified us that we had been scammed.”
Johnathan Quest, spokesperson for the Federal Bureau of Inquiry, told the news conference that the FBI had been tracking a series of BEC frauds being perpetrated by the same individual. When they intercepted emails from Bleichen about past due bills for the chlorine gas deliveries, they became concerned and contacted the company.
Scheele explained that Bleichen had received a request to set up a new delivery account for an existing food processing customer. “They claimed to be restarting the old Dolly Madison plant here in Delano and needed to get the water treatment plant functioning,” he explained: “They had the corporate account number and the right names on letterhead stationery as well as a legitimate looking email address for the account executive.”
Quest said that the FBI has lost track of the perpetrators and had not yet located their base of operations. “The Delano water facility where the deliveries were made has been cleaned up and re-abandoned.” He said, “We have multiple forensics teams going over the facility, but we have not yet found any useful evidence.”
When asked what the criminals had done with the chlorine gas, Quest replied: “We have found evidence that would seem to indicate that the material had been transferred to 5-lb pressure vessels, probably propane cylinders. We have not been able to identify a commercial purpose for small chlorine containers like this, so we do not know what financial incentives there were to perpetrate this fraud.”
Two 1-ton cylinders had been delivered for the initial order last month. A second order of one cylinder was delivered earlier this month and an empty cylinder was picked up. That means that as much as 2,000-lbs of chlorine gas may have been off-loaded into small cylinders. A technician from Bleichen that has been working with the FBI at the treatment facility told me that: “Propane cylinders are not approved for the storage of liquid chlorine, and there was no evidence of the equipment needed to do a liquid-liquid transfer at the site, so there is no way of telling how much chlorine was transferred to each cylinder. There were lots of them.”
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