Angelo Martino helped scam ransomware victims out of over $75 million, officials said.
A negotiator who dealt with scammers on behalf of ransomware victims was actually colluding with the attackers. Angelo Martino pleaded guilty to conspiring to interfere with interstate commerce through extortion. Martino, who faced up to 20 years in prison, sought a sentence of 24 months as part of a plea agreement. However, he was sentenced to 70 months behind bars.
Law enforcement officers have seized $10 million worth of assets that Martino obtained through the scheme. As Ars Technica notes, Martino will also have to fork over 10 percent of whatever salary he earns after his release from prison to compensate the victims. The victims, which included four companies and a non-profit, each paid ransoms of between $213,000 and $26.8 million, for a total of over $75 million.
Court filings detailed Martino's role in the scheme, starting 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 fully cooperated with investigators and says it had no knowledge of the scheme, assigned Martino to their cases. The BlackCat group paid Martino for confidential details about the negotiating strategy and position of the victims in order to maximize its ransom payments.
The government also claimed that Martino and two co-conspirators — who were each previously sentenced to 48 months in prison — deployed the ransomware against five victims themselves. One of those, a medical device company, paid a $1.2 million ransom.
"Angelo Martino sold out the very victims he was hired to represent, handing their confidential negotiating positions to BlackCat actors to drive up ransoms and enrich himself," Brett Leatherman, assistant director of the FBI Cyber Division, said.
BlackCat, which is also known as ALPHV, claimed credit for a number of cyberattacks in 2023, including one that caused a major outage at MGM Resorts. The Department of Justice said in December that year it had disrupted the group. The FBI developed a decryption tool that helped more than 500 victims avoid making over $68 million in total payments to the attackers, the DOJ said. The government is still trying to track down BlackCat administrators and affiliates. It has offered a reward of up to $10 million.
