20-year-old Israeli accused of identity theft using AI for bank fraud

20-year-old Niki Sokolov from the village of Tzur Yitzhak in the Sharon district is accused of large-scale bank fraud using artificial intelligence technologies, Calcalist reports.

According to investigators, Sokolov created “virtual” identities of real people using photographs from identity databases leaked to the Internet. Using AI technology, he created animated videos of “virtuals” and used them to open bank accounts and order credit cards, stealing funds from hundreds of people.

At the end of March 2026, when Sokolov realized that the police, who had launched a secret investigation in January of this year, were “sitting on his tail,” he fled to Thailand, where he was detained and extradited back to Israel.

As Senior Police Inspector Raviv Neuman explained in court, for the last two years, banks, as part of their customer service, have been allowing you to open a bank account and order a credit card through an application without a physical visit to the branch, relying on four methods of identification: real-time video, selfie, photo of an identity document, and confirmation that the client is the sole owner of the account.