Three Men Charged With Mimicking Executives' Voices to Steal $129 Million
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged three men with mimicking the voices and images of company executives to take more than $129 million from companies around the world. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York announced the unsealing of the indictment on Nov. 5, 2026. It named Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan and Guy Sheetrit, all arrested in Spain and the United Kingdom in 2026, and said extradition requests for them are pending.
The charges are accusations, not findings: the announcement states that the defendants are presumed innocent unless and until proven guilty. According to the indictment, a caller imitating a company's chief executive, sometimes with a matching image, would ask an employee for help with a confidential financial transaction. The employee was then referred to lawyers at a large international firm said to be working on the same deal. Those lawyers were allegedly members of the same group, and one of them would name the account for the wire. The announcement calls the technology super intelligence.
The announcement breaks the total down across the victim companies it names: hospital systems in Missouri and California, a bank in Rhode Island, a mutual fund company in Massachusetts, a British financial technology firm and a pet food company in Florida. The largest single loss listed is $11,578,474, from the British firm; the Missouri hospital system lost $4,829,580. Prosecutors allege the money, taken between 2024 and 2026, went to accounts in nine countries and was converted into cryptocurrency to hide its source.
Each man faces seven counts, covering wire fraud, aggravated identity theft and money laundering. The most serious charges carry up to 20 years in prison, a maximum set by Congress and given here for information only. Any sentence will be decided by a federal judge.
Spain's Policía Nacional and the United Kingdom's National Crime Agency assisted with the arrests, the office said. Its announcement asks anyone who believes they were a victim, or who has information, to use the FBI's online tips page.
