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Sexpionage Exposed: Iranian honeypot network baits IDF soldiers for intel to send Hamas

The women, who the news site said spoke fluent Hebrew, used social media platforms to seduce Israeli soldiers, mainly by sending nude images or provocative videos.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

In the latest case of “sexpionage”, an Iranian network of Hebrew-speaking women trained by Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps to seduce Israeli soldiers into giving intelligence has been exposed by the London-based Iranian opposition outlet, Iran International.

The women, who the news site said texted with a high level of Hebrew, used social media platforms to seduce Israeli soldiers, mainly by sending nude images or provocative videos. The information they hoped to gather was meant for Hamas in Gaza, Iran’s proxy terror group.

The identities behind these online personas are fabricated, but the explicit material shared with the soldiers is authentic, the report said. These cyber operatives, based in the northern Iranian city of Mashad, lure their targets by presenting themselves in revealing clothing or sometimes completely nude in the shared photos and videos. In some cases, they handle as many as 22 different avatars across various platforms.

Two operatives from Mashhad, identified as Samira Baghbani Torshizi and Haniyeh Ghaffarian, used their real images but posed as Israeli soldiers. Torshizi, known by the screen name “Or Olga,” claimed to be a Jewish immigrant in London who asked to see pictures of military vehicles from an Israeli soldier.

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The Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) recently thwarted a network of Hamas supporters using similar tactics. These accounts engaged with IDF personnel, simulating romantic relationships to extract sensitive information, including details about units destined for Gaza and ongoing operations.

The IDF explained that these profiles also created additional fake accounts posing as friends and relatives to enhance their credibility. In one instance, a profile inquired directly about a soldier’s base location and planned movements into Gaza. Another profile, named ‘Shira Simon,’ posed as an intelligence officer and questioned an IDF officer about his presence in the Golan Heights in Israel’s north. (Iran also backs the Hezbollah terror group in Lebanon and Syria.)

Israel’s Shin Bet security service revealed a comparable case last year involving an Iranian operator under the alias “Sara Puppi,” who pretended to be a young Jewish girl. In response, Twitter and Facebook suspended pages and profiles linked to an Iranian disinformation unit targeting Israeli nationalists and ultra-religious Jews.

The IDF has in the past foiled many attempts by Hamas to infiltrate soldiers’ phones by using fake accounts of young women on social networks to lure the men to download dangerous spyware.

In February 2020, the IDF and Shabak security agency attacked Hamas servers that had stored information stolen from hundreds of soldiers’ phones after they downloaded an app that beautiful-looking fictitious users had convinced them to use so that they could continue the budding relationships. The “girls” used the excuse that they were new immigrants to excuse any mistakes in their Hebrew.