Florida DigitalMint Negotiator Pleaded Guilty After Leaking Victims' Insurance Details to BlackCat

On April 20, 2026, Angelo John Martino III — a 41-year-old ransomware negotiator at DigitalMint, a Chicago-based cyber incident response firm based in Land O'Lakes, Florida — pleaded guilty to one federal count of conspiracy to obstruct commerce by extortion under the Hobbs Act after an FBI Miami field office investigation revealed he had been secretly feeding confidential client intelligence to the BlackCat/ALPHV ransomware group beginning in April 2023. Martino, whose job was to negotiate ransom demands down on behalf of companies under attack, instead opened a back channel to the same criminals holding his clients' data hostage and provided them with victims' cyber insurance policy limits and internal negotiation ceilings — giving the attackers perfect information about exactly how much each company could absorb. Across five insider-assisted attacks, ransom payments totaled more than $74 million, including $26.8 million paid by a nonprofit and $16.5 million paid by a hospitality company while Martino simultaneously messaged the attackers in real time: 'Keep denying our offers and I will let you know once I find out the max they want to pay.' In total, across more than ten attacks conducted with co-conspirators Ryan Goldberg and Kevin Martin, the scheme extracted $75.25 million in cryptocurrency from U.S. victims. Law enforcement seized over $10 million in assets including a luxury fishing boat, vehicles, a food truck, two Florida properties, and a 1999 Nissan Skyline. Martino faces a maximum of 20 years in federal prison at sentencing on July 9, 2026. The nonprofit victim — a mission-driven organization with no commercial revenue — paid nearly $26.8 million in a single ransom event, funds that could not be recovered. - - Disclaimer: This video is a dramatization based on real events. Some visual content was created with artificial intelligence assistance. Some details have been fictionalized and all names have been changed to protect the privacy of those involved.