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A Florida man who was the subject of a 2019 investigation by ProPublica was indicted last month on federal charges that he defrauded clients of his ransomware data recovery firm.
According to the Justice Department, the man, Zohar Pinhasi, told customers he could recover their encrypted files without having to pay hackers, when, in reality, he paid the ransom and charged victims a hefty fee on top.
The indictment mirrors the findings from ProPublica’s 2019 article “The Trade Secret,” which centered on Pinhasi and his scheme. The outlet found that the ransomware victims were being harmed twice: once by the hackers, who locked their targets’ files and demanded ransom, and a second time by MonsterCloud, Pinhasi’s Florida-based data recovery firm, which misled its clients about not paying ransoms.
