Man Accused of Hacking Climate Groups Can Be Sent to U.S., Judge Says

An English court approved on Wednesday the extradition of an Israeli man accused of New York prosecutors to administer a “rental piracy” operation that was addressed to environmental groups.

Prosecutors say that man -administered companies, Amit Forlit, 57, won at least $ 16 million by hacking more than 100 victims and stealing confidential information on behalf of a lobbying company that works for an important oil company.

Mr. Forlit’s lawyers identified the company as an exxonmobil in a presentation of the January court. Exxon has hosted by democratic general prosecutors and other local officials about their role in climate change. The demands claim that the company covered what it knew about climate change for decades to continue selling oil. The lobbying company was identified in the presentation as a DCI group.

An Exxon statement said the company had not been involved and was not aware of any piracy. “If there was any piracy involved, we condemn it in the strongest possible terms,” ​​said the statement.

A DCI spokesman, Craig Stevens, said the firm instructs employees and consultants to comply with the law and that no one in DCI was directed or involved “in any piracy that supposedly occurred a decade ago.”

DCI also said that “radical anti-Petroleum activists and its billionaire donors, many of which still sleep in beds paid by the fossil energy fossil trust funds of their family, sell conspiracy theories” about the company.

That was an apparent reference to the role of the Rockefeller family in supporting Ories that advocate the climate change litigation. The heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who made his fortune in the oil more than a century ago, today led a foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, who plays a key role in the movement to demand from oil companions about climate change. Lee Wasserman, its director, said it was the target of the piracy campaign.

Mr. Forlit was arrested in London last year after an accusation of Grand Jury in New York for electronic fraud charges, conspiracy to commit electronic fraud and conspiracy to commit computer piracy, which could take a sentence of length. His lawyers had argued that he should not be extradited because he would not receive a right trial in the United States due to the political storm on climate change litigation.

They argued that “one of the reasons that support the prosecution is to advance in the political cause motivated to persecute Exxonmobil, with Mr. Birthled a form of collateral damage.”

His lawyers also argued that Mr. Forlit would be in danger at the Metropolitan Detention Center, the only federal prison in New York, which has been full of violence and dysfunction. The high-profile defendants held there have included Luigi Mangione, Sam Bankman-Fried and Sean combs, also known as Puff Daddy and Diddy.

The Westminster Magistrates Court rejected those concerns. Mr. Forlit can appeal the decision. His lawyers did not respond immediately to comments requests.

One of the directed groups was the union of worried scientists, who has long investigated the role of the fossil fuel industry in what calls the misinformation of climate science. The group also obtains the science of attribution, the practice of using data to estimate the contributions made by specific corporations for the effects of global warming, such as the increase in sea level or forest fires. His work has cited in demands against the oil industry.

The organization learned about the piracy of a 2020 report by Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity surveillance group at the University of Toronto, Chordination to Kathy Mulvey of the Union of Conern scientists. The report found that computer pirates had signed up for non -profit groups that worked in a campaign called #Exxonknew, which the company had hidden information about climate change.

Numerous worried scientists unions received suspicious suspicious emails in which computer pirates tried to deceive them to renounce passwords or the installation of malicious software. Prosecutors of the United States Prosecutor’s Office for the Southern District of New York begged an investigation.

An associate or Mr. Forlit, Aviram Azari, declared himself guilty in New York in 2023 of crimes that include computer intrusion, fraud and identity theft and was sentenced to six years in prison.

Mr. Forlit directed three security and intelligence collection companies, two registered in Israel and one in the United States, which hired people to hack accounts and email devices, according to the presentation. His clients included a Washington lobbying company that worked on behalf of “one of the world’s largest oil and gas corporations, focused on Irving, Texas, in relation to the ongoing climate litigation that are presented against it.” Exxon was based in Irving.

The lobbying company identified objectives to Mr. Forlit, then he or another person cooled a list of Mr. Azari, owner of another company based in Israel and hired people in India to illegally access the accounts, the presentation said. These details were used to obtain documents that were delivered to the oil company and the media “to undermine the integrity of civil investigations,” the presentation said.