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Ransomware negotiator pleads guilty to helping ransomware gang

Angelo Martino, a former ransomware negotiator, has pleaded guilty to helping cybercriminals extort companies in cyberattacks. 

On Monday, the U.S. Justice Department announced the guilty plea. Martino, who used to work for cybersecurity firm DigitalMint, admitted to playing both sides of the negotiation in five different incidents. While ostensibly working for the victims, Martino admitted to feeding confidential information back to the operators of the ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware, providing them information such as the victim’s insurance policy limits, as well as their negotiation strategies. 

Martino’s goal was to maximize the criminals’ payout, for which he took a cut, prosecutors said. He is the third ransomware negotiator in the past year to face jail for the same scheme.

“Angelo Martino’s clients trusted him to respond to ransomware threats and help thwart and remedy them on behalf of victims,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva in the press release. “Instead, he betrayed them and began launching ransomware attacks himself by assisting cyber criminals and harming victims, his own employer, and the cyber incident response industry itself.”

ALPHV/BlackCat operated as a ransomware-as-a-service, meaning the gang develops and maintains the file-locking malware, while contractors working as affiliates deploy it in cyberattacks and pay a portion of the ransom profits back to the developers.

Last year, U.S. prosecutors accused another DigitalMint employee, Kevin Tyler Martin, as well as Ryan Clifford Goldberg, a former incident response manager at cybersecurity giant Sygnia, of going rogue and helping the ransomware gang that they were ostensibly working to counter during their day jobs. 

At the time, the authorities mentioned a third individual, without naming him, as being part of this scheme. We now know that it was Martino. 

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Martino pleaded guilty to extortion and faces up to 20 years in prison. Authorities said they have already seized $10 million in assets from him. 

According to the Justice Department, Martino also admitted to helping Goldberg and Martin deploy ALPHV/BlackCat’s ransomware against several victims inside the U.S. for six months in 2023. The three essentially became ALPHV/BlackCat affiliates during that time, making more than $1.2 million from one victim, according to prosecutors. 

When reached for comment on Tuesday, an unnamed DigitalMint spokesperson told TechCrunch in a statement that the company had no knowledge of Martino’s criminal actions and that it fired the two employees after learning of the accusations against them. 

In 2023, an international coalition of law enforcement authorities seized the dark web leak site of ALPHV/BlackCat, disrupting its operations. At the same time, authorities also released a decryption tool to help more than 500 ALPHV victims to restore their systems.

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Revolut eyes valuation of up to $200B in eventual IPO

British neobank Revolut seems to be eyeing a major valuation bump when it eventually goes public. The company is targeting a market cap between $150 billion and $200 billion in an initial public offering, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, citing anonymous investor sources.

The fintech giant, which secured a full banking license in the United Kingdom in March after years of waiting, was most recently valued at $75 billion, up from $45 billion in 2024, in a secondary share sale that made it one of Europe’s most valuable private tech companies.

Revolut’s co-founder and CEO, Nik Storonsky, last week said that the company’s IPO was at least “two years away,” according to Bloomberg.

According to PitchBook and the Financial Times, the company is working on another secondary share sale, scheduled for the second half of 2026, that would value it at more than $100 billion.

As of November 2025, the company had raised a total of $5.89 billion, according to PitchBook. Revolut reported revenue of $6 billion in the financial year ended December 31, 2025, up from $4 billion in 2024. The company’s net profit grew to $1.7 billion, up from $1 billion in 2024, and counted 68.3 million retail customers at the end of 2025.

Revolut declined to comment.

Founded in 2015, Revolut offers a range of services spanning multi-currency accounts, payment and transfer services, crypto products, insurance, and more. The neobank has been pouring truckloads of cash into expanding its operations internationally, and recently applied for a banking license in the United States.

Besides the U.K., Revolut has a banking license in the European Union, and it operates in Australia, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore, Brazil, and the U.S. Revolut launched operations in India last October, is about to start operating in Colombia this year, and has received a banking license in Mexico.

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Amazon taps Sweden’s Einride for its electric big rigs

Einride is adding 75 of its electric heavy duty trucks to Amazon’s Relay freight network as part of a deal that gives the Swedish startup a toehold in the e-commerce giant’s operations. Einride will also provide charging infrastructure across five locations in the United States, under the agreement announced Tuesday.

Amazon isn’t buying or operating the electric trucks. Instead, Einride will own and manage (using its own Saga AI software) the trucks, which can be used by drivers in Amazon’s Relay freight network. Relay, launched in 2017, is an app that truck drivers can use to book hauling gigs with Amazon.

Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli, who took over as chief nearly a year ago, said working with Amazon is a powerful validation of the startup’s technology and strategic vision.

“By deploying our intelligent platform within one of the world’s most sophisticated logistics networks, we are accelerating growth, while continuing to build industry-leading operational expertise,” he said in a statement.

Einride has gained attention and investment for its two-pronged approach to freight. The company has developed and now operates a fleet of about 200 heavy-duty electric trucks for companies like Heineken, PepsiCo, and Carlsberg Sweden in Europe, North America, and the UAE. It has also developed autonomous pod-like trucks, which stand out for their cab-less design.

The agreement with Amazon doesn’t include the autonomous pods.

Einride has landed this agreement at a critical time: The startup is finalizing a merger with blank-check company Legato Merger Corp. and is expected to go public soon.

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While the agreement might not carry the same weight for Amazon, which has a market cap of $2.7 trillion, it does contribute to its low-carbon goals. Amazon has said it wants to reach net-zero carbon emissions across its operations by 2040.

“This rollout is an important step forward in addressing one of the toughest challenges we face in decarbonizing our transportation network — electrifying heavy-duty trucking,” an Amazon spokesperson said in an emailed statement. “We’re excited to continue to collaborate with Einride and learn from these operations as the trucks hit the road.”

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YouTube expands its AI likeness detection technology to celebrities

YouTube is expanding its new “likeness detection” technology, which identifies AI-generated content, such as deepfakes, to people within the entertainment industry, the company announced on Tuesday.

The technology works similarly to YouTube’s existing Content ID system, which detects copyright-protected material in users’ uploaded videos, allowing rights owners to request removal or share in the video’s revenue.

Likeness detection does the same, but for simulated faces. The feature is meant to help protect creators and other public figures from having their identities used without their permission — a common problem for celebrities who find their likenesses have been used in scam advertisements.

The technology was first made available to a subset of YouTube creators in a pilot program last year before expanding more broadly to include politicians, government officials, and journalists this spring.

Image Credits:YouTube

Now YouTube says the technology is being made available to those in the entertainment industry, including talent agencies, management companies, and the celebrities they represent. The company has support from major agencies like CAA, UTA, WME, and Untitled Management, which offered feedback on the new tool.

Use of the likeness detection tool does not require entertainers to have their own YouTube channels.

Instead, the feature scans for AI-generated content to detect visual matches of an enrolled participant’s face. Users can then choose to request removal of the video for privacy policy violations, submit a copyright removal request, or do nothing. YouTube notes that it won’t remove all content, as it permits parody and satire content under its rules.

In the future, the technology will support audio as well, the company says.

Related to this, YouTube has also been advocating for similar protections at a federal level, with its support for the NO FAKES Act in Washington, D.C. This would regulate the use of AI to create unauthorized re-creations of an individual’s voice and visual likeness.

The company hasn’t yet said how many removals of AI deepfakes have been managed by the tool so far, but noted in March that the amount of removals was still “very small.”

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