The charges and the arrests
The U.S. Department of Justice has made public an indictment against three foreign nationals — Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan and Guy Sheetrit — alleged to have used artificial intelligence to impersonate chief executives and lawyers of large companies and convince employees to make substantial payments. According to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York, Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain during the summer, while Sheetrit was detained in the United Kingdom in September. The alleged conduct is said to have taken place between 2024 and 2026.
The scheme described by investigators involved two phases: the three presented themselves as corporate executives by contacting employees of various companies and asking for help with confidential financial transactions; they then directed them to purported lawyers at a major international law firm, whom they themselves impersonated, inducing them to arrange large wire transfers. The AI-altered voices and images served to make the identities of the false interlocutors credible.
The victims and the money
According to the Department of Justice, the total theft is alleged to have exceeded $129 million from companies around the world, including U.S. companies. Among the cases cited are nearly $5 million stolen from a hospital system based in Missouri, about $2.7 million from a Rhode Island bank, about $3 million from a California hospital system, more than $4.6 million from a mutual fund based in Massachusetts, about $5 million from a pet food company in Florida, and more than $11 million from a British technology company.
The funds, according to the reconstruction, were sent to bank accounts distributed across multiple jurisdictions, including the United States, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Austria, Slovakia and China. Once they arrived, the amounts were allegedly converted into cryptocurrencies in order to conceal their origin, ownership and control, and then distributed among the suspects and other alleged accomplices. The indictment also mentions a series of pseudonyms used by the three, including "Seba Clarke" and "Rocky Balboa" for Soall and "Superman Cash," "Fat Boy" and "Ron" for Hazan.
Official statements and open questions
Prosecutor Jamie McDonald observed that artificial intelligence offers great potential, but the public must be aware that some might use it for criminal purposes. James C. Barnacle Jr., the FBI deputy director responsible for the area, called the alleged scheme an example of how advanced technologies can be exploited for large-scale fraud, adding that the office intends to rapidly adapt its capabilities to identify and disrupt such activities.
The formal charges include conspiracy to commit wire fraud, several counts of money laundering and aggravated identity theft. For now, these are allegations: the responsibility of the suspects will have to be established in court, and the available material does not indicate the status of extradition proceedings or any defenses. It also remains unclear how much money was actually recovered and what role is attributed to the alleged accomplices mentioned in the indictment.
Why it matters
The case shows a step change compared with traditional social-engineering fraud: imitation of voices and faces via AI no longer serves only to deceive a single person, but to build a credible chain of command involving executive and legal figures. The combination of international wire transfers and conversion into cryptocurrencies then makes tracing capital more complex, as emerges from the list of countries cited in the indictment.
The affair fits into a framework in which U.S. authorities signal the need for rapid investigative responses in the face of evolving technologies. However, the material released does not quantify the overall scale of the phenomenon nor contain independent assessments of the effectiveness of measures adopted by the companies affected.
