US prosecutors charge three men with using AI-cloned CEO voices to take $129 million

The callers posed as the boss, then passed staff to fake lawyers at real law firms, who asked for the wire.

By Think Facility · November 7, 2026 · US Justice Department Cybersecurity

On November 5, 2026, federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment charging three men with taking about $129 million from companies by faking the voices of their chief executives. The US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York says the scheme ran from 2024 into 2026.

The three are Jacob Soall, 41, Sharon Hazan, 54, and Guy Sheetrit, 42. Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain and Sheetrit in the United Kingdom, and the US has asked for all three to be extradited. The charges are accusations, and the men are presumed innocent.

Charged: Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan and Guy Sheetrit
Taken: approximately $129 million from Victim Companies
Arrested: Spain on June 17 and August 5, 2026, United Kingdom on September 7, 2026
Next: extradition requests for all three are pending

How the calls worked

The callers started with an employee at the target company and posed as its CEO. They'd say they needed help with a confidential financial transaction, and they used AI to copy the CEO's voice on the call (in some cases the CEO's image too). The release calls the technology super intelligence, or SI, the name the administration has used for AI since Trump renamed it.

The upper floors of a pale stone government building with the words DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE carved above rows of tall windows, under a blue sky — The Department of Justice building in Washington. The case was brought by its US Attorney's Office in Manhattan. Photo: Tony Webster from Portland, Oregon, United States, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Then the fake CEO handed the employee off. The employee was told to contact lawyers at big international law firms who were supposedly working on the deal. Those lawyers were in on it too, and one of them would finally give the wire instructions, to an account the group controlled.

Soall mostly played the British lawyers, prosecutors say. He kept a handwritten script titled "Lawyer Call", and it included lines meant to stop the employee from talking to colleagues about the deal.

SI technology offers tremendous potential. But the public should recognize that there are some who seek to use this emerging technology to pursue criminal goals

From Southern District of New York | Three Foreign Nationals Arrested And Charged With Scheme To Use Super Intelligence To Defraud Companies Of $129 Million | United States Department of Justice

Where the money went

The release lists six of the companies hit, without naming them. The largest loss on that list is $11,578,474, from a financial technology company in the United Kingdom. Two hospital systems are on it as well, one in Missouri and one in California, along with a Rhode Island bank, a Massachusetts mutual fund company and a Florida pet food company.

The money went to accounts in nine countries, from the US and Spain to Singapore and China. From there it was turned into cryptocurrency to hide where it came from.

Laundering was Hazan's part, according to the indictment. Prosecutors say he boasted that he'd been laundering money since 1994 and had moved over $400 million in the past three years alone. He was convicted in the same federal district in 2008 of conspiracy to commit bank fraud.

Each man faces seven counts. Five of them, the wire fraud and money laundering charges, carry up to 20 years each. The two counts of aggravated identity theft carry two years each.

What it means for anyone who sends money at work

The FBI already tracks this kind of fraud. Its 2025 Internet Crime Report, announced on April 6, 2026, was the first in the report's nearly 25-year history with a section on artificial intelligence. That section covers 22,364 complaints and nearly $893 million in losses. The bureau names voice clones among the tools, alongside fake social profiles and believable videos of public figures or loved ones.

Next to that, one case worth $129 million is large. It comes to about a seventh of what Americans reported losing to AI-related scams in all of 2025. The two numbers don't measure the same thing, though: the indictment covers companies around the world over roughly two years, while the FBI counts complaints filed in one year.

For the person in accounts payable, the useful detail is the hand-off. A familiar voice was only the first step here. What made each request look real was a second person, a lawyer at a firm the employee had heard of, confirming it. And Soall's script was written to keep the employee from checking with the people sitting nearby. I'd treat a request to keep a payment secret from colleagues as the warning sign in itself.

The FBI's own advice in its report is short: "Resist pressure to act quickly" before handing over money.

What happens next

All three men are waiting on extradition to the US, and the release doesn't say when they'll first appear in a New York courtroom. The FBI is asking anyone who thinks they were a victim of the scheme to report it at tips.fbi.gov.