Federal prosecutors have unsealed an indictment accusing three men of using artificial intelligence to impersonate company executives and lawyers in a scheme that stole more than $129 million from businesses in the United States and Europe.
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 after being arrested in separate countries over several months beginning in June — Soall in Spain, Hazan in Israel and Sheetrit in Britain.
Prosecutors say the fraud ran for about 18 months starting in July 2024 and followed a repeated pattern. An employee at a targeted company, often someone in accounting or finance, would get an email purporting to come from a company executive. In one instance described in the indictment, an October 2024 email went to a major investment bank in New York City asking an employee to sign a nondisclosure agreement and then get on a call with a supposed lawyer. The defendants allegedly used the names of real attorneys at real firms, often drawing from among the world’s 50 largest law firms, to make the impersonation more believable.
A Script Called ‘Lawyer Call’
Soall allegedly kept a handwritten script titled “Lawyer Call” to guide the fraudulent calls, leaning on regulatory language and warnings about insider-trading risk to pressure victims into silence. Investigators say the group also tried to lure employees into video calls using deepfakes of chief executives, going beyond voice impersonation alone. The aim, prosecutors say, was to convince employees to wire company funds to accounts the defendants controlled.
Once money was wired, prosecutors allege it moved through bank accounts in Austria, China, Greece, Portugal, Singapore, Slovakia, Spain, the United Arab Emirates and the United States before being converted into cryptocurrency to hide its origin and then split among the defendants. Hazan and Sheetrit are accused of laundering the proceeds; Hazan allegedly boasted of laundering more than $400 million over the past three years. The men allegedly used aliases including “Rocky Balboa” for Soall and “Superman Cash” and “Fat Boy” for Hazan.
Victims Across Several States
The indictment names victims including a regional hospital system in Missouri that lost $4.8 million; a British financial technology company that lost $11.6 million; a pet food company in Florida that lost $5 million; a hospital system in California that lost $3 million; a mutual fund company in Massachusetts that lost $4.7 million; and a bank in Rhode Island that lost $2.7 million.
The case highlights a growing risk for businesses as AI tools make it easier to fake voices, faces and official-sounding language convincingly enough to trick even experienced finance staff into moving large sums of money.
