Feds: AI Deepfakes of CEOs and Lawyers Fueled a $129M Heist

The Justice Department dropped the hammer Thursday: three men are charged with running an AI-powered impersonation ring that allegedly drained at least $129 million from hospitals, banks and businesses around the world. The indictment, unsealed in the Southern District of New York, says employees were talked into wiring cash for confidential deals that never existed. Once the money landed in accounts the crew controlled, prosecutors say it got swapped into crypto and split up.

The defendants are Jacob Soall, 41, of Marbella, Spain, and the United Kingdom; Sharon Hazan, 54, of Israel; and Guy Sheetrit, 42, of Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Each faces seven counts, including wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Soall was arrested in Spain on June 17, Hazan in Spain on August 5 and Sheetrit in the United Kingdom on September 7. Extradition requests are pending, and all three are presumed innocent.

Hazan isn't new to a courtroom. Prosecutors say he was convicted of conspiracy to commit bank fraud in the same New York court back in 2008. He also allegedly bragged about his resume as a money man, claiming he'd been laundering cash since 1994, had moved more than $400 million in the prior three years alone, and called himself the number one operator in the world. Hazan and Sheetrit allegedly handled the laundering side of the operation.

The playbook was methodical. It ran from about July 2024 through at least this February, with targets in accounting who could greenlight big transfers. An email arriving through a service like DocuSign would appear to come from the employee's own chief executive, asking for help with a hush-hush transaction. One message to a worker at an unnamed major New York investment bank read, “We need to loop you into a deal we've been working on. The companies involved require you to sign an NDA – see attached.”

Then came the calls. Conspirators allegedly used AI to clone the executive's voice and sometimes their face, according to the indictment, before handing the employee off to a fake attorney. Soall handled most of the lawyer impersonations, posing as real attorneys in the European offices of major global firms and working from a handwritten “Lawyer Call” script. He leaned on confidentiality and insider-trading fears to keep employees from checking with colleagues, prosecutors say.

The losses trace across industries. A Missouri hospital system lost about $4.83 million in November 2024, and a Rhode Island bank lost roughly $2.68 million the same month. A California hospital system was out about $2.97 million that December, a UK fintech about $11.58 million in March 2025, a Massachusetts mutual fund company about $4.64 million in April 2025 and a Florida pet food company about $5.24 million in June 2025. The New York investment bank dodged its $2.85 million hit — its back office froze the wire before it left, per prosecutors.