3 Crooks Used AI Voice-Cloning Scheme to Steal $129 Million from Companies
by Lucas Nolan
Federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment last week accusing three men of using AI to impersonate chief executives and lawyers in a fraud scheme that drained more than $129 million from companies across the United States and Europe.
The New York Times reports that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York charged Jacob Soall, 41, of Marbella, Spain, and Britain; Sharon Hazan, 54, of Israel; and Guy Sheetrit, 42, of Israel and the United Arab Emirates, with wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. All three are awaiting extradition to the United States. Soall was arrested in Spain, Hazan in Israel and Sheetrit in Britain, with the arrests unfolding over several months starting in June.
Prosecutors say the scheme ran for roughly 18 months starting in July 2024, and it followed a consistent pattern. An employee at the target company, often an accountant or finance manager, would receive an email supposedly from a company executive. In one example cited in the indictment, an email went out in October 2024 to a major investment bank in New York City, asking an employee to sign a nondisclosure agreement and then call a supposed lawyer. The defendants allegedly borrowed the names of real attorneys at actual law firms, frequently drawing from among the 50 largest firms in the world, to make the impersonation convincing.
Soall allegedly kept a handwritten script titled “Lawyer Call,” used to walk victims through the fraudulent calls. The script leaned on regulatory jargon and warnings about insider trading risk to justify demands for secrecy and to discourage victims from discussing the calls with colleagues. Investigators say the conspirators also tried to draw employees into video calls using deepfakes of chief executives, not just voice impersonation. The goal of the elaborate AI-powered ruse was to convince workers to wire funds to accounts controlled by the perpetrators.
Once victims wired funds, the money allegedly moved into bank accounts controlled by the conspirators in Austria, China, Greece, Portugal, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. From there, prosecutors say, the money was converted into cryptocurrency to obscure its source and ownership before being split among the conspirators. Hazan and Sheetrit are accused of laundering the proceeds alongside other activities; Hazan allegedly bragged about laundering more than $400 million over the past three years. The men used aliases in connection with the scheme, including “Rocky Balboa” for Soall and “Superman Cash” and “Fat Boy,” among others, for Hazan.
Victims named in the indictment include a regional hospital system in Missouri, which lost $4.8 million; a British financial technology company, which lost $11.6 million; a pet food company in Florida, which lost $5 million; a hospital system in California, which lost $3 million; a mutual fund company in Massachusetts, which lost $4.7 million; and a bank based in Rhode Island, which lost $2.7 million.
AI presents potential beneficial uses for businesses of all sizes as well as individuals. But it also has serious landmines, like enabling cybercriminals to convincingly play the part of legitimate company leadership. Breitbart News social media director Wynton Hall has written his New York Times bestseller Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI to serve as the definitive guide on how the MAGA movement can create positions on AI that benefit humanity without handing control of our nation to the leftists of Silicon Valley or allowing the Chinese to take over the world.
Read more at the New York Times here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of AI, free speech, and online censorship.