Angelo Martino helped scam ransomware victims out of more than $75 million, officials said.
A negotiator who dealt with fraudsters on behalf of ransomware victims was actually colluding with the attackers. Angelo Martino pleaded guilty to conspiracy to interfere with interstate commerce by extortion. Martino, who faced up to 20 years in prison, requested a 24-month sentence as part of a plea deal. However, he was sentenced to 70 months in prison.
Law enforcement agents seized assets worth $10 million that Martino obtained through the scheme. As Ars Technica notes that Martino will also have to pay more than 10 percent of his salary after his release from prison to compensate the victims. The victims, including four companies and a nonprofit, each paid ransoms between $213,000 and $26.8 million, for a total of more than $75 million.
Court documents detailed Martino’s role in the scheme, beginning in April 2023. He colluded with the BlackCat ransomware group to extort five victims who hired Martino’s employer, DigitalMint, to help them negotiate. The company, which has fully cooperated with investigators and claims to have no knowledge of the scheme, assigned Martino to their cases. The BlackCat group paid Martino for confidential details about negotiation strategy and victims’ positions to maximize its ransom payments.
The government also claimed that Martino and two co-conspirators – who were each sentenced to 48 months in prison – deployed the ransomware against five victims themselves. One of them, a medical device company, paid a $1.2 million ransom.
“Angelo Martino betrayed the very victims he was hired to represent, entrusting their confidential negotiating positions to BlackCat actors to extract ransoms and enrich themselves,” said Brett Leatherman, deputy director of the FBI’s cyber division.
BlackCat, also known as ALPHV, has claimed responsibility for a number of cyberattacks in 2023, including one that caused a major outage at MGM Resorts. The Justice Department said in December that year that he had disrupted the group. The FBI developed a decryption tool that helped more than 500 victims avoid paying more than $68 million in total to attackers, the DOJ said. The government is still trying to track down BlackCat administrators and affiliates. He offered a reward of up to $10 million.
