Federal prosecutors in Manhattan unsealed an indictment that reads like a fire drill for legal departments. According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, three men allegedly ran an AI impersonation scheme: they cloned CEOs’ voices, and sometimes their faces, then handed employees off to fake lawyers at real big law firms, who allegedly gave the wiring instructions. The alleged take was more than $129 million, from two hospital systems, a bank, a mutual fund company and a pet food company.
The law firm cameo is the part in-house lawyers should sit with. A call from “outside counsel” on a hush-hush deal is exactly the cover that gets a wire approved fast. It’s a darker cousin of the AI-written complaints already landing on legal’s desk, and a good reason to add call-back rules to your AI risk playbook, the kind of work in our guide to future-proofing in-house counsel. See who’s hiring on our compliance counsel jobs page. The defendants are presumed innocent.
As the indictment alleges, per the release: “SOALL kept a handwritten script titled “Lawyer Call” that he utilized to make himself seem like a real attorney when speaking with and defrauding victims.”
Read: Three Foreign Nationals Arrested And Charged With Scheme To Use Super Intelligence To Defraud Companies Of $129 Million at U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York