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.
Always remember that there are three parts of AI security: security of AI, security with AI, and security from AI. This is the third.
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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…