Dutch police say they have taken into custody a 46-year-old man with dual Israeli and Polish nationality, for his role in a large-scale investment fraud scheme that operated 20 call centres and employed more than 700 people while reaping over €100 million (A$164 million) a month.
Although the police have not named him, the man has been identified as Ehud Tenenbaum, nick-named The Analyzer, by Dutch and Israeli media, and has a long history of hacking that goes back to the late 1990s.
“He is no stranger to the cyber world. According to publicly available information, he was previously prosecuted for hacking several prominent foreign government organisations, and is said to be a well-known hacker,” Dutch police said.
Ehud Tenenbaum (46) spil in mega-beleggingsfraude met miljoenen schade: meesteroplichter opereerde met honderden medewerkers in dienst https://t.co/Pc8UpgU8h7
— De Telegraaf (@telegraaf) July 15, 2026
Tenenbaum is alleged by Dutch police to have played a technical role in the fraud scheme, building the infrastructure for the network.
Named Operation Sunflower by police investigators, the scheme ran at least four years before being dismantled in July.
It used fraudulent advertisements that featured well-known Dutch and Belgian celebrities to lure victims into parting with money, with most being scammed out of more than €10,000 ($16,371) each.
A further five suspects were arrested in Poland, Cyprus, Greece and Belgium, with Dutch police not ruling out further captures.
Tenenbaum himself was arrested on May 26 at a Polish airport after arrival from Dubai and extradited to the Netherlands.
Three decades of hacking and brushes with the law
In 2001, Tenenbaum pleaded guilty to breaking into computer systems belonging to the United States Air Force and Navy, Pentagon, NASA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Knesset, Israel’s parliament.
The FBI’s investigation into the affair, codenamed Solar Sunrise, alarmed officials enough that briefings reached the White House, with the incident at first mistaken for a state-backed attack.
Tenenbaum served eight months of an 18-month sentence for the Solar Sunrise hacking.
In 2008, Tenenbaum and three associates were arrested by Canadian police and the US Secret Service, to face credit card fraud charges of around US$1.5 million ($2.15 million).
Investigators alleged the group breached financial institutions to harvest card data, then resold the numbers on to other fraudsters.
Following his extradition to the US, Tenebaum spend more than a year in custody and eventually accepted a plea bargain that included a time-served sentence, a US$503,000 penalty and three years’ probation.
He was again arrested in 2013 by Israeli police, over an alleged money laundering operation.
That operation was said to involve funnelling large sums of foreign cash into Israel, money that originated from criminals known to police.
The legal outcome of the 2013 arrest in Israel is not clear.
