The U.S. Justice Department has indicted three men for allegedly running a CEO-impersonation fraud that used artificial intelligence to copy the voices and images of real executives. According to The Record, prosecutors say Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan and Guy Sheetrit contacted lower-level employees pretending to be a company’s CEO or its lawyers and persuaded them to send large payments to accounts the men controlled. U.S. Attorney Jamie McDonald said the three used AI “to impersonate real people and deceive corporate executives into sending them and their co-conspirators approximately $129 million.”
Court documents described in the report say several incidents began with a call, mimicking the CEO’s voice or image, telling an employee they needed help with a confidential financial transaction. The employee was then told to speak with lawyers at a large international firm working on the deal, with AI used to make the scammers look and sound like those lawyers. Prosecutors say Soall typically played the lawyers using a script, and Hazan was in charge of laundering the money. The funds were wired to accounts in the U.S., Europe, the UAE and China before being moved into cryptocurrency.
The Record lists alleged losses of nearly $5 million from a hospital in Missouri, $2.6 million from a Rhode Island bank, $2.9 million from a hospital in California, $11.5 million from a tech company in the U.K., $4.6 million from a finance company in Massachusetts and $5.2 million from a Florida pet food company. The alleged conspiracy ran from 2024 to 2026. Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain this summer and Sheetrit was detained in the U.K. in September; extradition requests for all three are pending. They face up to 104 years in prison on charges including money laundering, aggravated identity theft and wire fraud. These are allegations, and none of the three has been convicted. The FBI urged other companies that may have been victims to come forward.
Sources
- U.S. Attorney’s Office, SDNY: Three foreign nationals arrested and charged in scheme to use “super intelligence” to defraud (linked from The Record; the page returned almost no content to our fetch, so facts are attributed to The Record)
- The Record: CEO-spoofing scammers used AI to help steal more than $100 million, feds say