CEO-spoofing scammers used AI to help steal more than $100 million, feds say

The Justice Department indicted three men for scamming companies out of more than $100 million with help from AI. 

Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan and Guy Sheetrit are accused of pretending to be company CEOs or lawyers and contacting lower-level employees to trick them into sending large payments to bank accounts they controlled. 

Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain this summer and Sheetrit was detained in the U.K. in September. The Justice Department said on Thursday that extradition requests for all three men are pending. 

U.S. 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.” 

Hazan, 54, and Sheetrit, 42, are from Israel while Soall, 41, is Spanish. All three are facing up to 104 years in prison on multiple charges of money laundering, aggravated identity theft, wire fraud and more.

The men allegedly stole nearly $5 million from a hospital in Missouri, $2.6 million from a Rhode Island bank, $2.9 million from a hospital in California, $11.5 million from a tech company in the U.K., $4.6 million from a finance company in Massachusetts and $5.2 million from a Florida pet food company. 

According to prosecutors, the conspiracy ran from 2024 to 2026 and involved the three as well as other co-conspirators deploying artificial intelligence as a way to spoof the voices and images of real corporate executives. 

Court documents said several incidents involved the three men contacting employees and telling them they needed help with a confidential financial transaction, mimicking the CEO’s voice or image on the call. 

To further the scheme, they would tell the employee to speak with lawyers at a large international firm that were working on the transaction — using AI to then make themselves look and sound like those lawyers. 

The money was wired to accounts across the U.S., Europe, the UAE and China before the scammers transferred it to cryptocurrency. 

Prosecutors said Soall typically impersonated the lawyers and had a script he used to mimic the attorneys. Hazan was in charge of laundering the funds, boasting in one instance of laundering $400 million since 1994, according to court documents. The Justice Department noted that Hazan was previously convicted of bank fraud in 2008. 

Senior FBI official James Barnacle said criminals continue to weaponize emerging technology like artificial intelligence. 

“The alleged scheme orchestrated by Soall, Hazan, and Sheetrit demonstrates how the use of advanced technology can be exploited to commit large scale fraud,” he said. 

The FBI urged other companies that may have been victims to come forward.