Trio accused of using deepfake CEOs and bogus lawyers to scam businesses out of $129 million
Three men allegedly used deepfakes of company CEOs and law firm attorneys to trick employees into wiring more than $129 million to accounts the group controlled, the Justice Department said.
The indictment names the three as Jacob Soall, 41, Sharon Hazan, 54, and Guy Sheetrit, 42. Soall used the alias “Rocky Balboa,” and Hazan went by “Superman Cash,” “Impossible Mission” and “Fat Boy,” among others.
The scheme ran from 2024 to 2026 and usually opened with someone posing as the victim company’s chief executive, using AI to mimic the executive’s voice or image on calls.
“While pretending to be the CEO, they would direct the employee to get in touch with lawyers at large international law firms who they said were also working on the sham financial transaction,” the Justice Department wrote.
“They would then also impersonate those lawyers to further make the employee believe that the financial transaction was real. A member of the conspiracy, impersonating one of those lawyers, would ultimately direct the employee to wire a large sum of money in furtherance of that sham financial transaction to a particular bank account, which was in fact controlled by members of the conspiracy,” they added.
Soall mostly played the part of UK attorneys. He kept a handwritten script titled “Lawyer Call” to help him sound like the genuine article, and it included lines meant to keep victims from discussing the calls with their colleagues.
From hospitals to pet food
The victims named in the indictment range from healthcare to finance. Two US hospital systems, one in Missouri and one in California, lost close to $7.8 million between them, and a Rhode Island bank wired out $2.7 million. The largest single loss listed, $11.6 million, hit a UK financial technology company, while a Florida pet food company lost $5.2 million.
The stolen funds went to accounts in the US, Spain, Portugal, Greece, the United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Austria, Slovakia and China. Once a payment landed, the group converted it into cryptocurrency to hide where the money came from and who controlled it, then split it among the conspirators.
Hazan and Sheetrit allegedly handled the laundering. Hazan boasted of laundering money since 1994 and of moving over $400 million in the past three years alone, and he claimed that among professional money launderers he was “number one all over the world.”
Hazan is not a new face to prosecutors, since he was already convicted of conspiracy to commit bank fraud in the Southern District of New York in 2008.
Each of the three men is charged with seven counts, including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. Five of the counts carry a maximum of 20 years in prison, and the two identity theft charges carry two years each.
Deepfakes on company calls
41% of CISOs reported at least one social engineering incident involving a deepfake during an employee audio call in the past 12 months, according to Gartner, and 36% said the same about video calls.
One of the best-known cases of executive impersonation came out of Hong Kong in 2024, when a finance employee at a multinational firm’s branch joined a video call that appeared to include the company’s CFO and several colleagues, then transferred over $25 million to accounts controlled by the scammers.
“The alleged scheme orchestrated by Soall, Hazan, and Sheetrit demonstrates how the use of advanced technology can be exploited to commit large scale fraud,” said FBI Assistant Director in Charge James C. Barnacle, Jr.
US Attorney Jamie McDonald noted the public “should recognize that there are some who seek to use this emerging technology to pursue criminal goals,” and he urged individuals and businesses to think about protecting themselves from this type of crime.
