New Jersey township wired $26 million to fraudsters — then hid the mistake for a month. Residents aren't buying the explanation

“I can’t even get on my iCloud account without a two-factor identification,” said Catherine Colaizzo, a resident of the city. “I don’t know how you would transfer $26 million. That seems a little bit absurd.”

Delayed disclosure

The theft of the money was bad, but some citizens were also upset by the timing of the city’s disclosure about the crime. Residents didn’t learn of the $26 million theft until Friday, Nov. 6, when Cranbury released a public statement. That was several days after an election that saw one of the five seats on the township committee up for grabs.

“We’re expected to believe that it’s a coincidence that you suddenly felt comfortable releasing this information at 3 p.m. last Friday afternoon, right after the election?” Carol Haring, who lost the race by 27 points, asked during the meeting.

Cranbury’s police chief took responsibility for the delayed announcement, saying he put a gag order on city officials and even refused a request by the mayor to make an announcement. Speaking too early, he said, would have alerted the thieves, who could have liquidated all of the stolen money. By delaying, the city was able to regain some of what was lost.

Still, at least one citizen vowed to find candidates to challenge any committee members up for re-election next year.

“I respectfully want to tell the township committee that the buck really should stop with you all,” said resident Jim Grossnickle.

A new criminal focus

Cybercriminals have increasingly been targeting local authorities. According to SonicWall Research, attacks on state and city governments were up 242% in the first half of 2026. That works out to more than 300 million intrusion alerts that were rated with either medium or high priority.

Those come as local governments often have lower budgets for their IT departments and may not have updated software that has security vulnerabilities.

“State and local government is the one place where the data does not show attackers backing off,” said Michael Crean, SonicWall SVP of Managed Services. “State and local government networks are taking the brunt of attacker focus. State and local IT teams are being asked to defend expanding digital footprints with limited resources, relying on aging public-facing systems and inconsistent departmental patch cycles. Attackers recognize these structural friction points, and they are actively exploiting them.”