Overview
- The Southern District of New York unsealed an indictment Friday charging Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan and Guy Sheetrit with wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering for an alleged scheme that ran from mid-2024 through February 2026.
- Prosecutors say the group sent fake CEO emails to accounting staff, then used AI-generated voice and sometimes video impersonations and staged calls posing as law firm attorneys to convince employees to authorize large wire transfers.
- The indictment ties the plot to more than $129 million in losses and lists specific victim hits, including roughly $4.83 million from a Missouri hospital system, $11.58 million from a U.K. fintech firm, and multi-million-dollar losses at U.S. banks and companies.
- Authorities arrested the three suspects in Spain and the U.K. between June and September and say the stolen funds were routed to international accounts and converted into cryptocurrency to obscure their origin; extradition proceedings to the U.S. are pending.
- The case highlights a new enforcement focus because criminals can combine social engineering with AI tools to scale fraud and it may push firms to add checks for out-of-band verification and tighter controls on wire transfers.