An Israeli-US dual national and alleged cybersecurity expert was charged with wire fraud in a New York court on Wednesday for paying off cybercriminals while falsely claiming that his company, MonsterCloud, could decrypt ransomware.
According to the US Justice Department, 50-year-old Zohar Pinhasi, also known as “Zack Silver” or “Zach Green,” targeted business owners victimized by hackers and ransomware attackers.
He claimed to offer a service that decrypted data as an alternative to paying the hackers off, charging clients large fees while purportedly using “proprietary tools” and “advanced decryption techniques” to recover the victims' data.
To present the company’s services as legitimate, MonsterCloud’s website included “testimonials,” some of which came from paid spokespersons.
Pinhasi allegedly had no special technology and instead contacted the cybercriminals who targeted the clients, paying them for the decryption keys needed to remediate the cyberattacks.
According to the DOJ, in 2019, a paid spokesperson contacted Pinhasi to ask whether MonsterCloud truly used proprietary software to decrypt data. Pinhasi allegedly responded that “MonsterCloud doesn’t hold any Proprietary technology [to] decrypt the ransomware data.”
Pinhasi collected total of $19 million from clients, paid $8 million to hackers
Pinhasi was accused of charging clients significantly more than it cost to pay the cyberattackers’ ransom and keeping the rest of the fee for himself.
In one 2023 incident cited by the DOJ, Pinhasi charged a client approximately $150,000 for MonsterCloud’s services and used only $8,200 of that to pay off the cybercriminal that targeted the client.
Since starting the fraud scheme in 2023, Pinhasi is alleged to have collected over $19 million in fees from clients and paid more than $8 million to cybercriminals.
If convicted of the two counts of wire fraud and one count of wire fraud conspiracy he was charged with, Pinhasi faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison for each count.