New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood has charged Eran Eyal, 43, the former CEO of Springleap, with allegedly stealing $600,000 from investors by fraudulently soliciting investors to purchase convertible notes through the false representations of his company.

Underwood says that this massive securities fraud scheme bilked investors out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Eyal comes from Brooklyn.

Springleap was a purported global crowdsourcing company that offered marketing, digital media, and platform design services to clients. Between 2014 and 2015, Eyal allegedly attracted investors to it through a series of false representations about the company’s management team, advisory board, creative professionals and client base. Springleap allegedly advertised that it had a prestigious management team that included chief technology officers; in reality, it had no CTOs. The names of the fabricated CTOs belonged to real people, but Eyal allegedly inflated their credentials. There was also no advisory board.

Eyal allegedly further misled investors by falsely claiming that Springleap had built a community of approximately 180,000 vetted creative professionals with "agency-level experience," whatever that is. In reality, he allegedly hired a freelance computer hacker to web-scrape computer data from a legitimate online portfolio website in order to obtain something that the attorney-general's office mysteriously calls "pedigree information."

Eyal also allegedly misrepresented to investors that Springleap had high profile corporations as clients – including a prestigious computer corporation and a multination semiconductor design company. In fact, neither company was ever a client.

The Attorney General's indictment pertains to four HNW investors who invested more than $600,000 in Springleap and never received any of their money back. Her investigation, however, has identified other Springleap investors located in Australia, South Africa and the United Kingdom who invested more than $1.3 million.

Eyal is charged with three counts of Grand Larceny in the Second Degree (a class C felony), one count of Grand Larceny in the Third Degree (a class D felony), one count of Unlawful Duplication of Computer Related Material in the First Degree (a class E felony), one count of Criminal Possession of Computer Related Material (a Class E felony), one count of Scheme to Defraud in the First Degree (a class E felony), and four counts of Securites Fraud under the Martin Act (a class E felony). If convicted on all counts, he faces 5 to 15 years in prison.