An English court on Wednesday approved the extradition of an Israeli man charged by New York prosecutors with running a “hacking-for-hire” operation that targeted environmental groups.
Prosecutors say that companies run by the man, Amit Forlit, 57, earned at least $16 million by hacking more than 100 victims and stealing confidential information on behalf of a lobbying firm working for a major oil company.
Lawyers for Mr. Forlit identified the company as ExxonMobil in a January court filing. Exxon has been sued by Democratic attorneys general and other local officials over its role in climate change. The lawsuits claim the company covered up what it knew about climate change for decades to continue selling oil. The lobbying firm was identified in the filing as DCI Group.
An Exxon statement said the company had not been involved in and was not aware of any hacking. “If there was any hacking involved, we condemn it in the strongest possible terms,” the statement said.
A spokesman for DCI, Craig Stevens, said the firm instructs employees and consultants to comply with the law and that no one at DCI had directed or was involved “in any hacking alleged to have occurred a decade ago.”
DCI also said that “radical anti-oil activists and their billionaire donors, many of whom still sleep on beds paid for by their family’s fossil-energy legacy trust funds, peddle conspiracy theories” about the firm.
That was an apparent reference to the role of the Rockefeller family in supporting organizations advocating for climate-change litigation. Heirs of John D. Rockefeller, who made his fortune in oil more than a century ago, today lead a foundation, the Rockefeller Family Fund, that plays a key role in the movement to sue oil companies over climate change. Lee Wasserman, its director, has said he was targeted by the hacking campaign.
Mr. Forlit was arrested in London last year following a grand jury indictment in New York on charges of wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud and conspiracy to commit computer hacking, which could carry a lengthy sentence. His lawyers had argued that he should not be extradited because he would not receive a fair trial in the United States because of the political firestorm over climate change litigation.
They argued that “one of the reasons underpinning the prosecution is to advance the politically motivated cause of pursuing ExxonMobil, with Mr. Forlit a form of collateral damage.”
His lawyers also argued that Mr. Forlit would be in danger at the Metropolitan Detention Center, the only federal jail in New York, which has been plagued by violence and dysfunction. High-profile defendants recently 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 immediately respond to requests for comment.
One of the groups targeted was the Union of Concerned Scientists, which has long researched the fossil fuel industry’s role in what it calls climate science disinformation. The group also does source-attribution science, the practice of using data to estimate the contributions made by specific corporations to the effects of global warming, like sea level rise or wildfires. Its work has been cited in lawsuits against the oil industry.
The organization learned of the hacking from a 2020 report by Citizen Lab, a cybersecurity watchdog group at the University of Toronto, according to Kathy Mulvey of the Union of Concerned Scientists. The report found that hackers had targeted American nonprofit groups working on a campaign called #ExxonKnew, which argued that the company had hidden information about climate change.
Numerous Union of Concerned Scientists employees received suspicious emails in which hackers tried to trick them into giving up passwords or installing malicious software. Prosecutors with the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York began an investigation.
One associate of Mr. Forlit, Aviram Azari, pleaded guilty in New York in 2023 to crimes including computer intrusion, wire fraud and identity theft and was sentenced to six years in prison.
Mr. Forlit ran three security and intelligence-gathering firms, two registered in Israel and one in the United States, that hired people to hack into email accounts and devices, the filing said. His clients included a Washington lobbying firm working on behalf of “one of the world’s largest oil and gas corporations, centered in Irving, Texas, in relation to ongoing climate change litigation being brought against it.” Exxon was previously headquartered in Irving.
The lobbying firm identified targets to Mr. Forlit, then he or another person gave a list to Mr. Azari, who owned another Israel-based firm and hired people in India to illegally access the accounts, the filing said. Those details were used to obtain documents that were given to the oil company and the media “to undermine the integrity of the civil investigations,” the filing said.