US indicts three over AI-assisted CEO spoofing fraud
Prosecutors say the men posed as executives and lawyers on calls, using AI to copy voices and images, and took roughly $129 million from companies.
The US Justice Department has indicted three men over a scheme that prosecutors say used AI to impersonate company executives and lawyers, pulling in more than $100 million from businesses.
Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan and Guy Sheetrit are accused of contacting lower-level employees while posing as CEOs or lawyers and talking them into sending large payments to accounts the group controlled. Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain this summer; Sheetrit was detained in the UK in September. The Justice Department said on Thursday that extradition requests for all three are pending.
US Attorney Jamie McDonald said the three used artificial intelligence "to impersonate real people and deceive corporate executives into sending them and their co-conspirators approximately $129 million."
Court documents describe a repeated pattern: an employee is told they're needed for a confidential financial transaction, with the CEO's voice or image mimicked on the call, then pointed to lawyers at a large international firm who are supposedly handling it. Prosecutors say AI was used to make the callers look and sound like those lawyers too. Soall is said to have handled the lawyer role with a script; Hazan is described as running the laundering, and is said to have boasted of laundering $400 million since 1994. He was convicted of bank fraud in 2008.
Funds were wired to accounts in the US, Europe, the UAE and China, then moved into cryptocurrency, according to prosecutors. The conspiracy is alleged to have run from 2024 to 2026.
The named losses include $11.5 million from a UK tech company and $5.2 million from a Florida pet food company. The indictment doesn't say how many other companies were approached, and the FBI has asked any others that were hit to come forward.
For defenders, the mechanics here are the old ones: a call that sounds like the boss, urgency, and a payment that bypasses the normal approval chain. Voice cloning raises the cost of trusting a familiar voice, but the control that catches this is still a callback on a number you already have, and a second person signing off on large transfers. Nothing in the indictment suggests a technical compromise of any victim's systems.
Sources
- CEO-spoofing scammers indicted for using AI to help steal more than $100 millionPrimarytherecord.media
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