Newshot Three People Arrested for AI-Enhanced Impersonation Fraud
It’s hard to believe how lucrative this crime can be:
According to a press release from the United States attorney’s office for the southern district of New York, three men Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan, and Guy Sheetrit were arrested for using AI to alter and impersonate the voices and images of executives and attorneys at various companies in order to convince employees to send over large payments. Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain over the summer, while Sheetrit was arrested in the United Kingdom in September. The alleged fraud took place between 2024 and 2026. With the help of AI, the men allegedly acted as a corporate executive, targeting employees of various companies and telling them they needed their help with sensitive financial transactions. They would then instruct the employees to get in touch with lawyers at a large international law firm. The men would then impersonate a lawyer at these firms and have the employees wire a large amount of money. The men ultimately stole more than $129m from companies all over the world including in the US, according to the DoJ.
According to a press release from the United States attorney’s office for the southern district of New York, three men Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan, and Guy Sheetrit were arrested for using AI to alter and impersonate the voices and images of executives and attorneys at various companies in order to convince employees to send over large payments. Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain over the summer, while Sheetrit was arrested in the United Kingdom in September. The alleged fraud took place between 2024 and 2026.
With the help of AI, the men allegedly acted as a corporate executive, targeting employees of various companies and telling them they needed their help with sensitive financial transactions. They would then instruct the employees to get in touch with lawyers at a large international law firm. The men would then impersonate a lawyer at these firms and have the employees wire a large amount of money.
The men ultimately stole more than $129m from companies all over the world including in the US, according to the DoJ.
Always remember that there are three parts of AI security: security of AI, security with AI, and security from AI. This is the third.
Tags: AI, cybercrime, identity theft, impersonation, law enforcement, scams
Posted on November 11, 2026 at 7:05 AM • 5 Comments
Comments
Clive Robinson • November 11, 2026 7:36 AM
@ Bruce, ALL,
Most new technologies bring a new looking form of fraud with them.
Eventually either people get used to it and the fraud success rate drops, or the technology goes out of fashion / use.
I used to know an accountant who was indirectly at the heart of the first major fraud by Fax Machine.
The details are dull you just need to know that a previous technology called Telex had a legal status and people assumed it carried forward with faxes (it did not).
There are still remnants of Telex hanging around, but faxes appear to have been consigned to the under the desk basket of history.
Thus the question,
“How long before Current AI and ML systems suffer those or similar fates and which will be first?”
Take YouTube, a friend was looking at some cooking videos, they asked me if using sweet potatoes to make cakes was possible as they had seen one or two vids that had them in “healthy cake making”.
I pointed out that you can substitute cold mashed potatoes for sone flour in breads and some cakes as I’d done it (similar with rice flour) but I’d not tried sweet potatoes as I did not think it would work well.
So we looked through a few vids and it quickly became clear they were all copies of each other with different faces and stuff in the background moving from shot to shot. And importantly there was a US flag in each and every one of then…
It then became clear as they all promoted certain types of sham products, but importantly asked you to contact them through the comments.
For those that do not know there are fairly strict rules and regulations about pushing things, but… If you interact first through the comments then they mostly don’t apply in the US.
So these scammers know how to get things to work, and in many cases will get away with it even if the money they make is “small potatoes”.
Hence why some scammers have in effect “followed the money” with these “scamming corporates” doing it via social engineering of the employees…
Ask yourself,
“Who is really to blame, the ‘running scared or overworked’ employee or their corporate bosses…
Winter • November 11, 2026 9:39 AM
It’s hard to believe how lucrative this crime can be
When such large sums are stolen from powerful people, who also lose face, it is best to be located in a pirate nest that does not extradite the perpetrators.
So, if you are not in Russia/China/NK, you are very likely to be tracked down and apprehended.
For $100M+ it is certainly worth to spend $10M+ to reclaim it.
I do not entertain the illusion that I could hide successfully from investigators that can spend $10M+ to find me.
Clive Robinson • November 11, 2026 12:56 PM
With regards,
“I do not entertain the illusion that I could hide successfully from investigators that can spend $10M+ to find me.”
It’s actually done all the time, we just don’t get to hear about it that often.
It basically requires,
1, Knowledge 2, Training 3, Preparation 4, Planing 5, For thought
And a few other things.
The above enables you to develop a split existence and transition from one life to another before anyone starts looking for you, or more importantly has cause to.
Such people are those that are known as “No Official Cover”(NOK) in spy novels thrillers etc.
They are basically individuals that have a “lived in backstory” where they have built up “official paperwork and records” have dentists and doctors etc under their “backstory details”.
One of the things that scares the intelligence folk is the rise of “homeworking” as you can have two or more jobs living in different locations and “time-share” in a way that makes all look “full-time”.
The real issue for most people is that the person living that way has lack of what are seen as meaningful social attachments.
Some often quite intelligent people really don’t overly care about such attachments as for obvious reasons they don’t find them sufficiently meaningful. Thus they can cultivate acquaintances that assume the person is a friend or more without them actually being so.
If you look back in the UK news papers, you will find the out cry over Metropolitan Under Cover operatives that were actually married, but also living with women they were using under cover. And in some cases actually had mortgages and family with.
You can do this because there are quite a few jobs that involve “distance contracting” where you spend quite a bit of time “on the road and in hotels” and even abroad.
It’s actually not that difficult to set up “front companies” that use other commercial entities to provide “an office” and all that most people would expect to see from the outside. I can provide you with the addresses of a couple that I’ve used in the past when contracting, for the simple reason it gave me the same level of privacy an ordinary employee gets working out of an also-ran office.
Fun fact even though the companies had meeting rooms available where you could bring customers, there was a lot else you had to sort out and that could give rise to other issues. Which is why I found it was not just better but also less expensive –and risky– to rent rooms in London Hotels at the Airports or major rail stations and get catering etc done by the hotel and even put customers up overnight etc (it also gave me free or reduced cost hotels to stay in over a weekend).
The thing is such a lifestyle can be “normal” for people working in not just start-ups but being the senior public face etc in quite large companies. Or just being in “sales and marketing” or “technical customer support” in certain types of engineering.
So having given you some ideas of where to start 😉
P.S. Oh something else get a nice SUV type vehicle with tinted windows etc. It’s not that difficult to adapt in a way that allows you to “live in the back”. You will also need 24H gym membership of a national type gym such you can arrive looking like you’ve been jogging and leave showered, exercised, even fed, and in nice / office cloths. I’ve “lived out of a back pack” not an SUV for months at a time, even sleeping in the office and getting about on a bicycle the hard part was dodging “the cleaning staff”… But then “engineers” are always seen as a bit odd and working “all hours” and living off coffee and breakfast cereal or pasty in the microwave 24×7. One place I worked used to feed me quite well, as they saw it as cheaper than paying overtime.
We don’t hear much about the SUV, Van, and even tent existence… but it is becoming the “new way of life” in quite a few places in North America. With people just vanishing at clocking-off time and reappearing at clocking-on time. The fact some don’t make it out the underground car park in winter –because it’s warm– often does not get noticed.
lurker • November 11, 2026 1:54 PM
“It’s hard to believe how lucrative this crime can be.”
- It is recognised as a crime; 2) The perps were caught.
That has to be positive, but it’s only an ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. These guys going to jail won’t stop others from trying the same trick. Our job is to build the fence at the top of the cliff, which is much harder. Guardrails and sandboxes are no defence against the ease of moving money to places without extraditoon treaties.
These guys got greedy, and kept on milking their cash cow. Whereas the incompetent Ronnie Biggs grabbed his money and ran …
lurker • November 11, 2026 7:14 PM
Elsewhere, a brand new library in Coimbatore, India, was stocked with AI written books by fictitious authors, all from the same publisher at grossly inflated prices. The ~US$32M scam was picked up by an erudiite visitor detecting obvious hallucinations and dodgy ISBN nrs.
‘https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/chennai/suspected-ai-written-books-phantom-authors-and-bogus-history-300cr-coimbatore-periyar-library-procurement-under-scanner/articleshow/135615876.cms
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