Three men have been charged in the United States with using artificial intelligence to impersonate company chief executives and lawyers in a fraud that prosecutors say stole about $129 million from businesses around the world.

The US Department of Justice said the indictment, unsealed by prosecutors in Manhattan, charges Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan and Guy Sheetrit with using what it calls “super intelligence” to copy the voices and images of real executives and attorneys, then persuading employees to send large payments to bank accounts controlled by the group.

How the alleged scheme worked

According to the indictment, the scheme ran from 2024 to 2026. The men and their co-conspirators targeted employees who held accounting roles and had the authority to wire large sums of money, then contacted them posing as senior executives or lawyers who needed help with sensitive transactions.

Prosecutors say the impersonations were convincing enough that staff believed they were speaking to their own leadership. Soall, who prosecutors say played the role of a fake attorney, kept a handwritten script titled “Lawyer Call”. Hazan is alleged to have boasted that he had laundered money since 1994 and handled more than $400 million in the previous three years.

The case was brought by the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the FBI’s New York field office, and is being handled by the office’s Complex Frauds and Cybercrime Unit.

The victims named in the indictment

The indictment lists losses at six named victims, among others around the world. Prosecutors say the group took $4,829,580 from a hospital system headquartered in Missouri, $2,684,580 from a bank headquartered in Rhode Island and $2,968,497 from a hospital system headquartered in California.

The other named losses were $11,578,474 from a financial technology company headquartered in the United Kingdom, $4,639,918 from a mutual fund company headquartered in Massachusetts and $5,242,747 from a pet food company headquartered in Florida.

US Attorney Jamie McDonald said the three men “abused groundbreaking super intelligence technology to impersonate real people and deceive corporate executives into sending them and their co-conspirators approximately $129 million”.

Arrests and extradition

Soall, 41, of Marbella in Spain and the United Kingdom, was arrested in Spain on 17 June 2026. Hazan, 54, of Israel, was arrested in Spain on 5 August 2026, and Sheetrit, 42, of Israel and the United Arab Emirates, was arrested in the United Kingdom on 7 September 2026. Extradition requests for all three men are pending.

Each faces charges including conspiracy to commit wire fraud, which carries a maximum of 20 years in prison, along with money laundering and aggravated identity theft counts. The charges are allegations, and the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty.

Why it matters

The case is a warning that AI voice cloning and deepfake video have moved from a curiosity to a tool for large-scale corporate fraud. A phone call or video message that sounds and looks like a chief executive is no longer proof of who is on the other end of the line.

Businesses are being urged to verify any urgent payment instruction through a separate, trusted channel before money moves, rather than trusting a call alone. The FBI has asked anyone who believes they were a victim of the scheme to report it at tips.fbi.gov.