{"id":893887,"date":"2026-09-13T06:26:15","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T06:26:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/893887\/"},"modified":"2026-09-13T06:26:15","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T06:26:15","slug":"joonko-ceo-pleads-guilty-to-27-million-securities-fraud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/893887\/","title":{"rendered":"Joonko CEO pleads guilty to $27 million securities fraud"},"content":{"rendered":"

Israeli citizen Ilit Raz pled guilty to securities fraud charges in the US after she was found to have defrauded investors<\/a> of around $27 million by misleading them about the core aspects of a company she founded, according to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York.<\/p>\n

The company, Joonko Diversity, Inc., claimed to offer AI<\/a>-based services designed to help employers identify and hire prospective job candidates.<\/p>\n

Raz, the founder and former CEO of Joonko, made false claims about the company\u2019s customers and revenue to raise around $27 million in funding from investors between 2021 and 2022.<\/p>\n

To entice prospective and existing investors, Raz claimed that Joonko\u2019s customers included large global companies, including fashion brands, a credit company, and a travel company.<\/p>\n

According to a 2024 US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) complaint, Raz claimed that Joonko had more than 100 customers and had worked with over 100,000 job candidates.<\/p>\n

The SEC complaint also detailed that she provided investors with fabricated<\/a> positive testimonials of alleged customers praising Joonko\u2019s effectiveness.<\/p>\n

The US Attorney\u2019s Office asserted that Raz knowingly misled investors and that the companies were never customers of her company.<\/p>\n

Several victims of Raz\u2019s fraud schem<\/a>e were left with millions of dollars in losses when Joonko went bankrupt, according to US Attorney Jamie McDonald.<\/p>\n

The fraud scheme was uncovered around 2023 when one investor became suspicious about Raz\u2019s claims and contacted her to request information about Joonko\u2019s performance.<\/p>\n

Raz then forged a bank statement showing that the company maintained an average balance of more than $5,000,000, when the company\u2019s actual balance was millions of dollars less than that.<\/p>\n

Raz also sent the investor fictitious purchase orders for alleged Joonko customers that contained forged signatures from entities that had no business relationship with the company.<\/p>\n

Her scheme was uncovered, and after pleading guilty to the charges, Raz faces a maximum prison sentence of 20 years.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Israeli citizen Ilit Raz pled guilty to securities fraud charges in the US after she was found to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":893888,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,2169,20403,2512,3430,2146,61,772],"class_list":["post-893887","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-crime","tag-fraud","tag-investment","tag-new-york","tag-startup","tag-technology","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893887","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=893887"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/893887\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/893888"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=893887"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=893887"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=893887"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}