The Lawton Economic Development Authority on Tuesday authorized the reissuance of a payment of nearly a quarter of a million dollars to Fisher59 Properties that was hijacked by international cybertheft in a wire transfer last year.
Fisher59 submitted a request to LEDA, via an email on April 9, 2025, for reimbursement of $224,840.34 in expenses incurred during construction of a road to its warehouse and distribution center in the Airport Industrial Park.
Six days later the City of Lawton submitted to LEDA, “also within the same email stream,” an inspection report and recommendation for approval of Fisher59’s request for reimbursement.
LEDA approved the payment on April 17, 2025.
A little over a month later, on May 21, 2025, LEDA Executive Director Richard Rogalski received a text message from Brett Walford, president of Fisher59 Properties, stating that he had not requested a wire transfer and had not sent bank payment instructions, “and further stated that he believed his email had been ‘hacked.’” In a closed-door executive session during their March 26 meeting, LEDA’s board of directors was informed by Lawton Police Detective Brandon Becker that the $224,840 wire transfer to Fisher59 that was authorized on April 17, 2025, was “misdirected” by “a party outside of the United States with no association to any trustee, officer, employee, or agent of LEDA, the City of Lawton, nor Fisher59 Properties.”
Walford told the LEDA board that Fisher59 paid their general contractor, Bob Moore Construction of Grapevine, Texas, $224,840 for the road to their property. “We were without the funds as of March 20, 2025,” Walford said.
“I submitted my reimbursement request on April 9, 2025. Then around the 15th LEDA received a request for reimbursement of Pay Application #3 … via an email that appeared to come from my account,” Walford continued. “This was the third reimbursement request; the first two were paid by check and mailed to me.”
Walford said that when he inquired about a check for reimbursement, “We found out it had already been paid via ACH…” [ACH is an electronic transfer of funds between bank accounts through the Automated Clearing House network, used for direct deposits, bill payments, and other bank-tobank transactions.] “There was no phone call confirming that’s what we wanted to do,” Walford said. “I consider this standard practice when wiring money, ACH, or other electronic funding, and it is something we do at Fisher59.”
At the request of the City of Lawton, “They asked us to have our general contractor build the road, and at the time it made sense to everyone to move forward with that approach… It did add about six to eight months to the front end of our building, so it pushed us back a bit from when we originally got started. We started the firstpass work back in February of ’24 and really didn’t get going until late ’24.”
Walford also said the contract added “several conditions that added carrying costs” to Fisher59. “There were a few pieces – engineering and project management – that couldn’t be paid until the end of the project and haven’t been paid yet,” and those amounted to “about $100,000.”
He said he “went back and reviewed the contract,” and it provides that “if the City is delinquent in paying, the City would be on the hook for 5% interest on those funds.” For pay application #3, “12 months of interest on $224,000 is roughly $11,000 at 5%.”
Continuing, Walford said, “So far, to date, and including additional upcoming payments, you’re going to have about $1.5 million above and beyond the $224,000 that we essentially carried those costs for, on average, two months at a time, and at 5% for two months out of the year, that’s an additional $13,000.”
Financing alone “cost us about $30,000,” he said. “Not to mention the time that I put into the project as far as tracking these payments, putting together the pay applications, following up on the pay apps, and so I put a dollar amount associated with that, as well.”
Fisher59 has been in Lawton 42 years
Fisher59 has invested $20 million “in a brandnew facility here on the edge of Lawton, so we’re invested in Lawton and want to be around for a long time. We’ve been here since 1984. To date the financial burden has fallen solely on Fisher59, and for that reason we’re asking for the $224,840.34 to be paid back.”
“Who did the email go to?” LEDA Board Chairman David Madigan asked.
“To the city’s Public Utilities and myself,” Rogalski replied.
Walford said he created the pay application and sent it to Rogalski, “and I guess from there it was intercepted, and they went back to Richard with a request” for a wire transfer.
“There were actually several emails back and forth, which is really weird,” Rogalski said. “I have a valid email stream with invalid emails in that stream, and that’s really what got us. We thought we were carrying on a secure conversation with Brett, and it turns out it wasn’t.”
Madigan asked Walford if his computer was compromised, internally in his company.
Nick Anderson, chief executive officer of Fisher59, said, “I think it’s fair to say you received something that appeared to be us, or that you thought was us, but it wasn’t us.”
Walford said, “Yeah, maybe the email was compromised.”
He then said, “The only other thing I’d like to emphasize is the fact that this happened in March of last year, and we’re just finally getting to the point where we can talk about getting reimbursed.”
No fault ascribed to payment theft
Rogalski told Southwest Ledger that Walford was paid the $224,840.34 – “in person, by check, and he signed a release” – on Friday.
A resolution which authorized the payment to be reissued to Fisher59 Properties includes a sentence stating that the document “does not constitute an admission of fault or assignment of culpability to LEDA, the City, or the Redeveloper.”
The LEDA board also approved payment #10 for $186,972 to Fisher59 on Tuesday, and payment #9 for $299,478 to the Denton, Texas-based beverage distributor during the March 26 meeting. Both payments were for “the cost of public improvements associated with construction of a new warehouse and distribution center...”