WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. (CBS12) — A Hollywood man who owned a Florida ransomware remediation company is accused of secretly paying cybercriminals to unlock clients’ data while falsely claiming he used proprietary technology to do so, federal prosecutors said.
Zohar Pinhasi, 50, also known as Zack Silver and Zack Green, was arraigned Wednesday in federal court in Brooklyn on a wire fraud charge, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.
Prosecutors said Pinhasi owned MonsterCloud LLC, a ransomware remediation company that marketed itself as an alternative to paying ransom demands after a cyberattack.
The company told clients it could recover encrypted data through “advanced decryption techniques” and proprietary tools, prosecutors said. But investigators allege Pinhasi had no special technology to decrypt the data and instead contacted the hackers responsible for the attacks, paid their ransom demands and obtained decryption keys.
Pinhasi then allegedly charged clients substantially more than the ransom payments, prosecutors said.
In one example cited in the indictment, prosecutors said Pinhasi paid about $8,200 to a cybercriminal in August 2023 but charged the client about $150,000.
Over the course of the alleged scheme, Pinhasi charged clients more than $19 million and paid more than $8 million in ransom payments, authorities said.
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Federal prosecutors also allege MonsterCloud used testimonials that included paid spokespeople. In a 2019 message to one spokesperson who questioned whether the company had proprietary ransomware-decryption software, Pinhasi allegedly said MonsterCloud did not have such technology.
“By falsely claiming to decrypt ransomware without paying off the ransomers, the defendant re-victimized his clients while extracting a hefty profit for himself,” U.S. Attorney Joseph Nocella Jr. said in a statement.
If convicted, Pinhasi faces up to 20 years in prison.
