Men allegedly impersonated voices and images of executives to convince employees to send large payments Three foreign nationals were arrested and charged with using AI to allegedly impersonate corporate CEOs and attorneys to steal over $100m, according to an indictment that was newly unsealed by the US Department of Justice. According to…
Page F136From§Eachthe afternoon edition — 7 November 2026
AI blamed for trillions lost, credited for trillions regained, charged with stealing $100 million.
As it ran on the front
On October 22, the S&P 500 lost 1.2 percent and the Nasdaq composite lost 2.6 percent, the worst day for stocks since July. The wire that day named the AI industry's own datacenter and chip costs as the cause. By November 3, those same shares had recovered the ground. A loss that week got a name and a number; the recovery got neither.
That night, voters in dozens of jurisdictions passed 44 ballot measures restricting data centers, citing power bills and jobs. By Thursday the market fell again, its worst session in eighteen months, and the president named the voters as the cause, calling it a sad thing to watch. The rout did not stay home. It reached Asia by Friday morning and London by afternoon, carrying the voters' name the whole way across.…
…(cont) By the close of that same Friday, the AI sector had climbed back the trillions wiped out two days before. No correction was filed. The blame that crossed two oceans on Thursday did not make the return trip on Friday; it stayed where it had been dropped, on the ballot box.
Then the weekend's filing arrived, and for once the ledger carried an itemized number. The Southern District of New York unsealed an indictment: Jacob Soall, Sharon Hazan and Guy Sheetrit, charged with using the same technology — the one blamed for the crash and credited for the rebound — to alter the voices and faces of real corporate executives and attorneys, convincingly enough that real employees wired out more than $100 million, between 2024 and 2026. Soall and Hazan were arrested in Spain this summer, Sheetrit in the United Kingdom in September.
Run the two ledgers side by side, hon. The market ledger — trillions lost, trillions found — carries no line item, no name, no date you can hang a number on; it just moves, and the blame moves with it, one direction only. The indictment ledger has three defendants, a dollar figure, two countries of arrest, and a two-year window. Of the two numbers attached to artificial intelligence this week, only one of them can be entered into evidence, and it is not the trillions.
“They hang a market dip on regular voters Thursday, then the stocks climb back Friday and nobody walks the blame back — that kind of blame don't have an expiration date, it just sits on your record. Meanwhile the only guys who actually turned AI into real money did it by robbing payroll departments for a hundred million bucks. Tell me which ledger the people running this thing actually believe in.”
“The president was simply responding to market conditions in real time — voters made a choice, markets reflect choices, that's not blame, that's just, uh, correlation. And this indictment, three guys scamming company payrolls, that's a crime story, it's got nothing to do with the broader AI growth story — did I just call it a growth story? Forget I said that.”
Earlier in this story
- Stocks rebound Friday; the blame assigned to voters Wednesday is not withdrawn. By Ruth · the afternoon edition, 6 November 2026
- Trump blames voters for crashing markets data-center backers warned them about. By Ruth · the morning edition, 6 November 2026
- Data-center backers warned voters they'd end up poor, then their own stocks lost $2 trillion by Thursday. By Ruth · the afternoon edition, 5 November 2026
- Trump warns data-center opponents they'll end up "backwards and poor," Nasdaq ends up backwards and poor instead. By Ruth · the morning edition, 5 November 2026
The receipts
Investors had been selling off tech shares in part due to concerns the Democrat election victory would mean slower AI development.
· Sharp drops for AI stocks overwhelm markets worldwide as oil prices jump from the morgue, 22 Oct 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.