- 1A criminal complaint against Saul Shalev was filed under seal on Feb. 24, 2025; filings were unsealed Oct. 3.
- 2He is charged with wire fraud, money laundering, aggravated identity theft and aiding and abetting.
- 3The complaint says more than 25 victims have been identified.
Federal prosecutors have charged an individual in the long-running fraud that has plagued small business finance, a scheme that used a network of stolen identities and cryptocurrency exchanges to take millions from merchants, funders and lenders. The case had been under seal.
Timeline
A criminal complaint against Saul Shalev, who is 36 and has addresses in Brooklyn and Israel, was filed under seal on Feb. 24, 2025. On Aug. 20, 2025, it progressed to a sealed indictment. All the filings were made public on Oct. 3, 2025. The industry had first read about the scheme in a report published less than a year before the complaint.
The charges
Shalev is charged with wire fraud, money laundering, aggravated identity theft, and aiding and abetting. He is presumed innocent until proven guilty. The original criminal complaint and the indictment are both available.
What the complaint says
- Shalev holds dual American and Israeli passports, and according to the complaint, he went to Israel in February 2019 and has not come back to the United States since.
- Law enforcement used IP addresses, email accounts and other internet data in its investigation.
- The complaint says the scheme was still operating earlier in 2025.
- More than 25 victims have already been identified.
At the time of the reporting, Shalev may still have been at large.
Source reporting: deBanked.
