Wesley Edens co-founded Fortress Investment Group and co-owns the Milwaukee Bucks. He's 64 and a billionaire. A woman he met on LinkedIn tried to take more than $1 billion of it. On Tuesday, Changli “Sophia” Luo, 46, pleaded guilty to wire fraud in a Manhattan federal court, the Journal's Corinne Ramey and James Fanelli report. The recording she threatened him with, she admitted, never existed.
Here's how prosecutors say it worked. The first contact was a LinkedIn message from Luo to Edens. After several in-person meetings, she claimed she had recorded a private encounter at her home. In court she admitted that was a lie, and that she used the threat of a recording to try to get money. She contacted his family, including his wife and ex-wife, and threatened to go to the media. One message in the court file warned that his “business partners will learn about you and your misdeeds from these interviews.” Edens, who had divorced before meeting Luo, went to law enforcement. His spokesman said he did it out of concern for his own and his family's safety.
Edens wasn't the only target. Prosecutors charged Luo in June with using romance to steal from two other men. She met one of them on LinkedIn as well. After a date, she asked him to buy her a $2,000 Apple computer. Prosecutors said she then took a secret photo of his credit card. It later paid for a $4,500 online order from Apple. She met the third man by cold-calling him for donations to her nonprofit, which said it produced video interviews with economists. Her run ended in 2025 at JFK Airport, where federal agents stopped her boarding a flight to China.
Six other counts go away with the plea. One of them said she tried to extort more than $1 billion. The deal has her paying $2 million in penalties. Sentencing is set for Feb. 26. Prosecutors and her lawyers agreed that three to four years in prison would be appropriate. “I deeply regret engaging in this conduct,” she said in court.
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Insurance/Consumer Protection · M11. Avoid, for the pattern, since there's nothing here to buy. Strip the names away and this is a standard script. A warm message on a professional network. A few meetings that build trust. Then a threat built on a lie, aimed at the one thing a successful person can't buy back, a reputation. It reached a man who runs billions for a living, and it reached his family before it stopped. The demand gets sized to the target. The script doesn't change.
Your connection is your own LinkedIn inbox and the people in your house. Do two things this week. Open LinkedIn's settings, find the control for who can message you, and tighten it to your connections. Do the same for your spouse and your college-age kids. Then make a family rule, said out loud. Any threat to expose you, true or false, goes to law enforcement the same day, and no money moves. Edens had every resource on earth, and the step that mattered was a call to the authorities. You lock the door before the knock, not after.