Homo homini lupus. Man is a wolf to man, Plautus already wrote two centuries before our era. Rony Hadjedj and the gang that the Israeli press nicknamed “the wolves of Tel Aviv” have perfected this law of the strongest. Their tool was called Airsoft, software designed to control hundreds of fake online brokers and empty the accounts of thousands of clients. Today we find the same mechanism in cryptocurrency investment scams, the same pipe but under a different guise.
On July 6, 2025, at Casablanca airport, this 36-year-old Franco-Israeli got off a flight from Dubai. On site, the Moroccan police immediately arrested him, with an international arrest warrant from the Bamberg public prosecutor's office in hand. Thirteen years on the run end there between two boarding gates.
From armed robberies in the beautiful neighborhoods of Marseille to the management of Airsoft. This software allowed more than 400 fraudulent brokerage sites to empty the accounts of thousands of savers, from France to North America via Europe and Asia.
This article could not have existed without the investigation into Rony Hadjedj and Airsoft software from Mediapart and the EIC network.
Le Journal du Coin read this survey and verified what could be done with other sources. He completed it with what it says, once again, about the business of investment scams, even in its crypto side.
From the robbery of wealthy Marseillais to the trading scam software
On May 12, 2010, two hooded men robbed an apartment in Marseille. The driver waiting for them, 20 years old, is called Rony Hadjedj. Sentenced to six years in prison in 2012, he fled to Israel under the name Jeremy Atlan and there became a fake broker in binary options and CFDs, a profession that the Israeli press nicknamed “the wolves of Tel Aviv”.
2013: the first sites targeting French savers
From the end of 2013, Rony Hadjedj launched at least five sites intended for French customers, CEA Finance, Finanperf or Golden Bank, managed by a shell registered in Anguilla which the Panama Papers revealed belonged to his own mother. In January 2015, the AMF placed these brokers on a blacklist, but the courts did not respond to the victims' complaints.
“The Financial Markets Authority (AMF) draws the public's attention to the activities of CO&H Ltd, as well as those of CEA FINANCE, FINANPERF, ANALYSIS FINANCE, GA FINANCE and FINANCE TRADITION and reminds that these entities are not authorized to provide investment services on French territory.”
Airsoft, the family business that sold a turnkey scam
At the end of 2014, Hadjedj thought bigger and launched Airsoft, a software platform to operate fraudulent white label brokers, set up as a family business with his sister Amandine, owner on paper of the shell which collects most of the income. Based on paper in Cyprus and Hong Kong, Airsoft actually has around twenty employees in Ramat Gan, under the direction of Shay Benhamou, a Canadian-Israeli replaced in 2021 by Cédric Halfon. The software allowed “free manipulation of the market”, since there was “no trading in the normal sense of the term”.
An economic model built on manipulation
The economic model was crystal clear in its brutality. Brokers paid Airsoft between 5 and 8% of their “net deposits”, a direct percentage of savers’ losses. Over 2018-2023, more than 440 sites used this software to collect 950 million euros, including 53 million kept in commissions. Amazon Web Services, which hosted several of these sites, eventually warned in 2021 that it “had enough.” Airsoft did not, however, cut off the brokers concerned, simply offering them a new brand.
Mafia, hitman and impunity in Israel
The character cultivates a flashy lifestyle and the company to match. The EIC has established its proximity to the Jarushi clan, one of the most violent mafia families in the country according to the Times of Israel. Arrested in 2016, he nevertheless emerged free, without prosecution. In August 2022, a hitman fired three bullets at his Audi, without him being on board. Despite this signal, Airsoft continues to film in Israel for another year.
Canadian office worker and Bavarian prosecutor bring down the snake's head
But it took two unrelated men to stop the machine. The first, a Canadian whom Mediapart calls Travis P., lost $24,250 in 2017 on a site using Airsoft. He began to investigate alone, listed more than 500 sites using the software and alerted regulators in around twenty countries in 2017. Radio silence, until 2023.
The second man is Nino Goldbeck, chief prosecutor in Bamberg. By investigating several networks of shady brokers, he discovers that they all run on the same infrastructure and targets the tool rather than each site. On September 4, 2023, Israeli police searched the Airsoft headquarters, whose assets were seized. Cédric Halfon, Shay Benhamou, Amandine and their mother end the day in police custody. Rony Hadjedj, absent from the country that day, slipped through the cracks.
The extradition and trial of Shay Benhamou
Shay Benhamou was finally extradited from France in 2024 and tried in Bamberg in June 2026. According to Finance Magnates, he ultimately pleaded guilty to complicity in fraud and received four years in prison. “I’m ashamed, people were lured by the illusion of profits and lost everything,” he told the audience. Rony Hadjedj remains in prison in Morocco, his 2012 French conviction for the Marseille robberies having never been carried out.
From trading scam to crypto scam: same software, different asset
However, what makes the Airsoft affair valuable for a crypto reader is not only its scale, it is its model. The software managed bets on stocks, currencies and cryptocurrencies indiscriminately. The technology didn't care about the underlying asset, only how much the client was going to lose. According to the EIC section relayed by the Journal de Montréal, part of the remuneration of general manager Shay Benhamou was also paid in bitcoins, up to 132 BTC, approximately $14 million depending on their conversion.
This is exactly the logic we find today in “pig butchering” crypto scams, where fake exchanges display false charts while the victims’ money ends up outside of any real market. Airsoft did not invent anything, it industrialized the process, including customer support and “rebranding” policy. The crypto sector just redecorated it, with fake price tables and Telegram influencers on top of that.
The other lesson concerns the judicial strategy itself. For years, individual complaints and blacklists changed nothing. Le Journal du Coin had already reported how the AMF was struggling to keep up with communities of victims who listed more platforms than the regulator. What brought down Airsoft was a shift in target: prosecutor Goldbeck attacked the infrastructure provider common to all the fronts. For the first time, a judicial authority struck the “head of the snake” rather than its innumerable scales.
A lesson for crypto regulation
This logic of the “single supplier” to be brought down to dry up an entire ecosystem, crypto regulation is barely discovering. American lawsuits against cryptocurrency mixers or exchange platforms without identity verification follow the same reasoning. Tackle the pipe rather than each faucet. Airsoft operated for nine years before a prosecutor attacked it head-on. How many crypto equivalents are operating, even today, with the same impunity?
