PASCO COUNTY, Fla. – A Florida man who was supposed to help companies recover from devastating cyberattacks will spend nearly six years in federal prison after prosecutors revealed he was secretly moonlighting for the hackers.
Angelo Martino, 41, of Land O’Lakes, Florida, was sentenced today to 70 months in prison. The former ransomware negotiator pleaded guilty on April 14 to conspiring to interfere with interstate commerce through extortion.
According to court documents, Martino abused his position at an American cyber incident response firm starting in April 2023. Instead of protecting his employer’s clients, he took payouts from the BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware gang to feed them confidential corporate negotiation strategies, helping the hackers squeeze victims for the highest possible payouts.
“Angelo Martino’s victims shared heartbreaking accounts of how their businesses were nearly destroyed, while the people they hired to help them instead betrayed them to ransomware gangs,” said Assistant Attorney General A. Tysen Duva of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division.
The conspiracy eventually expanded to include other industry insiders. Martino teamed up with Kevin Martin, 36, a coworker at his firm, and Ryan Goldberg, 41, who worked for a competing incident response company. Between April and November 2023, the trio used BlackCat ransomware to launch fresh attacks against businesses across the United States. In one instance, they successfully extorted $1.2 million in Bitcoin from a victim, split the money three ways, and laundered the proceeds.
“He was hired to help victims in a moment of crisis,” said U.S. Attorney Jason A. Reding Quiñones for the Southern District of Florida. “Instead, Martino betrayed them, fed their confidential negotiating positions to ransomware criminals, and helped squeeze them for more money.”
Federal authorities have already clawed back a massive portion of the illicit profits. Law enforcement has seized $10 million in assets from Martino, which include digital currency, vehicles, a food truck, and a luxury fishing boat. A formal restitution hearing is scheduled for September 17 to determine how much Martino must pay back to his victims.
His co-conspirators, Martin and Goldberg, were sentenced on May 1 to 48 months in prison by Judge K. Michael Moore in the Southern District of Florida.
“Angelo Martino sold out the very victims he was hired to represent, handing their confidential negotiating positions to BlackCat actors to drive up ransoms and enrich himself,” said Assistant Director Brett Leatherman of the FBI Cyber Division.
The case is part of “Operation Riptide,” a broad, ongoing FBI crackdown on the infrastructure and financial networks driving global cybercrime. The sting follows a major disruption campaign by the Justice Department in December 2023, during which the FBI seized BlackCat websites and distributed a custom decryption tool that saved hundreds of victims an estimated $99 million in ransom demands.
The investigation was spearheaded by the FBI’s Miami field office with help from the U.S. Secret Service. The case was prosecuted by Trial Attorneys Christen Gallagher and Jorge Gonzalez of the Criminal Division’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section (CCIPS), alongside Assistant U.S. Attorneys Thomas Haggerty and Quinshawna Landon. Asset forfeiture is being managed by Assistant U.S. Attorneys Mitchell Hyman and Denielle N. Croke.
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