Three Suspects Charged in $129 Million AI CEO Fraud

The U.S. Department of Justice charged three individuals with stealing more than $129 million from corporations worldwide using artificial intelligence to impersonate chief executives and legal counsel. The Southern District of New York and the FBI announced the charges on Thursday.

Sharon Hazan, an Israeli national, and Guy Sheetrit, who holds dual Israeli and Emirati citizenship, face multiple counts of wire fraud, money laundering, and identity theft. They are charged alongside Jacob Soall, a dual Spanish-British national. The trio allegedly coordinated the scheme to deceive corporate employees into executing urgent financial transactions.

Court documents indicate the fraud began with the selection of specific employees at target companies. The suspects used AI to generate convincing visual and audio fakes of each company's CEO. They contacted these employees, posing as the CEO, and instructed them to wire large sums of money for a confidential deal.

To validate the transaction, the group also impersonated lawyers from prominent international law firms. Soall primarily handled these legal impersonations, using scripts to mimic real attorneys and pressuring targets to keep the deal secret. This dual strategy of executive and legal authority aimed to prevent employees from seeking additional verification.

Victims included a UK-based financial technology firm that lost $11,578,474, a Missouri hospital system that lost $4,829,580, a Florida pet food company that lost $5,242,747, and a California hospital system that lost $2,968,497. The stolen funds were wired to bank accounts in Spain, Portugal, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Austria, Slovakia, and China.

Co-conspirators in those countries converted the cash into cryptocurrency to obscure the asset ownership before distributing profits. Hazan played a major role in the money laundering operations and was arrested in Spain on September 7. He was previously convicted of fraud in New York in 2008 and claimed to have laundered over $400 million in recent years.

Sheetrit was also arrested in the United Kingdom on September 7, while Soall was arrested in Spain on July 17. Extradition requests for all three suspects are pending. If convicted, they face maximum sentences of 20 years per count for wire fraud and money laundering, plus two years per count for aggravated identity theft.