The scheme
Over more than a year and a half, the defendants targeted thousands of companies across the world, according to the indictment. Their victims included hospital systems in Missouri and California, a bank in Rhode Island, a financial technology company in the United Kingdom, a mutual fund company in Massachusetts and a pet food company in Florida, according to court documents.
The trio often targeted the companies’ accounting departments. They would send an email purporting to be from the CEO and ask for help with a confidential financial transaction, according to court documents. They would also coordinate a phone or video call where the defendants used AI to mimic the voice and sometimes the image of the CEO, according to the indictment.
The defendants would then tell the employee to contact an attorney at a major law firm, whom the group was also ready to impersonate, according to court documents. Soall mainly impersonated attorneys from the UK and had a “handwritten script titled ‘Lawyer Call’ that he utilized to make himself seem like a real attorney when speaking with and defrauding victims,” according to the US attorney’s office.
The impersonated attorney would tell the employee to wire large payments to bank accounts across the world, according to court documents. The funds were then converted into cryptocurrency to try to conceal where they came from and then distributed to the trio and others involved, according to court documents.
