Three men face US charges for using AI to copy the voices and faces of company bosses and lawyers, then getting staff to wire about $129M.
The US Attorney's Office in Manhattan said the indictment is now unsealed. It names Jacob Soall, 41, Sharon Hazan, 54, and Guy Sheetrit, 42. Prosecutors allege the men imitated executives and lawyers convincingly enough that employees sent the money. Spanish police arrested Soall.
The technique is usually called a deepfake: AI-generated audio or video that imitates a real person. Deepfakes are not new to fraud, but the amount here stands out. One of the larger publicly known earlier cases, at the engineering firm Arup in 2024, involved a Hong Kong employee who transferred about $25M after a video call with fake colleagues, according to press accounts at the time. At $129M, the sum in this indictment is roughly five times that.
The allegations cover both bosses and lawyers, two roles that commonly appear when large payments are approved. That matters because it points to a target that no software filter protects: a person who gets a call or a video request that looks and sounds like someone senior.
An indictment is a set of allegations, not a finding of guilt. It also leaves open how many companies were targeted, over what period, and how much of the money has been recovered. Those details will show whether this was a handful of large hits or a repeatable operation.