Federal prosecutors in New York unsealed an indictment Nov. 5 against three men accused of running a fraud ring that used artificial intelligence to impersonate company executives, allegedly stealing more than $129 million from businesses around the world over roughly a year and a half, according to the indictment filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
The defendants — Jacob Soall, 41; Sharon Hazan, 54; and Guy Sheetrit, 42 — are from Spain, the United Kingdom, Israel and the United Arab Emirates and went by nicknames including "Rocky Balboa," "Superman Cash" and "Fat Boy," prosecutors say. They face charges of wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money-laundering conspiracy; all three have been arrested, and the government is pursuing their extradition to face trial.
How the scheme worked
Prosecutors say the group would first email a company's accounting staff, posing as the chief executive and claiming to need urgent help with a confidential financial deal. They would follow up with a phone or video call in which AI tools mimicked the executive's voice — and sometimes face — to add credibility, then hand the employee off to a fake outside attorney, often played by Soall using a script prosecutors have dubbed the "Lawyer Call," who instructed them to wire large sums to bank accounts scattered around the world. The stolen money was then converted into cryptocurrency to obscure its trail before being split among the defendants and others, according to the charging documents.
Victims named in the case include hospital systems in Missouri and California, a bank in Rhode Island, a fintech company in the United Kingdom, a mutual-fund firm in Massachusetts and a pet-food company in Florida — a spread prosecutors say shows the group targeted companies indiscriminately rather than pursuing a single industry.
As criminals continue to weaponize emerging technologies, the FBI remains committed to rapidly adapting our capabilities.
James C. Barnacle Jr., FBI Assistant Director in Charge
The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, which brought the case, said the charges are allegations and that the defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty; defense counsel for the three had not been identified in court filings as of Thursday evening, according to reporting on the case. It lands as federal agencies increasingly warn that generative AI has lowered the cost of convincing voice and video impersonation to the point that routine financial safeguards — a callback, a video check-in — can no longer be assumed to catch a fake.
The case is one of the largest AI-enabled fraud prosecutions brought so far, and it follows a string of smaller voice-cloning scams that have hit businesses and families alike since generative AI voice tools became widely available over the past two years. Security researchers have repeatedly warned that the technology needed to clone an executive's voice from a few minutes of public audio — an earnings call, a conference talk, a company video — is now cheap and easy to obtain, a point underscored by the sheer number of companies this ring is accused of targeting.
