“Entirely Unaware”: Data Firm Behind Israel’s Newest Foreign Agent Says It Didn’t Know
In the first on-the-record response of this investigation, Refinition confirms Sniper Advertising is its reseller; it learned of Sniper’s FARA registration from my email, says no campaigns active.
If you’ve been following my Project 545 coverage, you know the shape of it by now: Israel’s roughly $145 million campaign to shape American opinion, eight registered foreign agents, every document linked at project545.org.
As part of my investigation, I check FARA.gov regularly for any new registered agents of Israel. In June, Sniper Advertising Services popped up, not through an intermediary like Havas Media… the name on the filing: Gideon Sa'ar, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.
A new arm to the beast
In June 2026, a company called Sniper Advertising Services registered with the Justice Department as a foreign agent of two Israeli ministries, Tourism and Foreign Affairs. According to the filing, Sniper has an oral agreement with the Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs for volume-based digital advertising, including “curating audiences” and “cohort deployments.”
So who exactly is Sniper Advertising Services? It’s not as easy of a question to answer as you may think. It took some digging to find anything of substance, and what I found is that Sniper is essentially two men and a great deal of mail forwarding.
A Wyoming corporation whose registered agent chain stacked like Russian nesting dolls into Wyoming Corporate Services, who NPR once described as 2,000 companies living in one small house.
A business address that is a numbered suite in Deerfield Beach, Florida. Owners: Frederick T. Hickerson III of Key Largo, and Larry Kerschenbaum, a dual US-Israeli citizen living in Israel. The only public record naming them is the FARA filing itself.
But Sniper’s website kept gesturing at something bigger: a location-data platform, an opt-out email at a domain called refinition.com, and audience-methodology language that read like it came from somewhere else.
It did… until I reached out.
This blank landing page is all you’ll find if you go looking today. Perhaps they are busy writing their own privacy policy and finding new case studies to poach.
The search that found nothing
Refinition is an actual, reputable marketing company: hundreds of millions of mobile devices, most of the US adult population, years of location history. A company like that has paperwork somewhere.
So I looked. Texas seemed right; the trail pointed to Austin. I searched the Texas Secretary of State’s records for Refinition.
Nothing.
I searched the Texas Comptroller’s taxable entity database, which catches even dead companies.
Nothing.
An Austin company with no Texas footprint under its own name is not a dead end. It is a company wearing a name that is not its legal one, and there is a federal agency where brands cannot stay anonymous: the trademark office. A trademark application must name its owner.
Serial number 97442243, filed 2022, mark: REFINITION. And behind it, a Texas assumed name certificate, filing number 804083318, dated June 4, 2021, which reads like the answer key to the whole puzzle. The assumed name Refinition belongs to GeoDataScience Inc., a Delaware corporation, principal office at a virtual suite in Austin’s Littlefield Building. Signed by Roger Heaston.
The company potentially behind the geofencing platform behind Israel’s newest foreign agent is literally named Geo Data Science. Sometimes the universe hands you one for free.
One more document brought everything together. Sniper’s privacy policy, on their own website, was Refinition’s privacy policy, word for word, still identifying “Refinition (’we’ or ‘us’)” as the responsible party and still defining “this Website” as refinition.com.
Israel’s new agent is a company with a stolen privacy policy, potentially fabricated case studies, who farms out work from a company that has no idea that Sniper was a registered foreign agent, nor that they had stolen almost all the language for their website from said reseller.
The people, and what I did not find
Heaston’s resume is aggressively normal: NetSuite, a retail-media CTO job, a founder-mentor gig. His chief strategy officer spent two decades on the ad side of Conde Nast magazines. The likely investor behind the ventures is a Santa Fe money manager with a Goldman Sachs past. A ten person Austin boutique built to help retailers chase shoppers between stores.
And here is what I did not find, stated with the same weight as everything I did: no Israel-adjacent work, no political clients, no government contracts, no visible overlap of any kind between these people and Sniper’s two owners. Trust me, I looked.
So I wrote to Roger Heaston, laid out every documented fact above, and told him my working assumption straight up: nothing suggested his company sought or knew about any of this, a reseller relationship running below his radar seemed most plausible to me, and if that was accurate I would print it plainly.
The answer
Three days later, the first on-the-record company response of this entire investigation landed in my inbox. My stomach lurched.
After months of fruitlessly chasing responses regarding doubled ledgers, a $31.5 million contract to Trump’s former campaign manager, and a missing $700,000 that was likely paid to influencers but never documented, this small company answered in seventy-two hours.
Heaston confirmed the relationship: Sniper is a Refinition reseller.
He wrote that his company was “entirely unaware, until you sent us this email, of them filing a FARA registration as a foreign agent of any country,” that Refinition is “currently not engaged in any advertising campaigns with Sniper,” and that it holds no agreements with any foreign countries.
On the website: his team checked, found Sniper had “copy/pasted much of the content of our website of a few years ago,” privacy policy included, and has asked Sniper to take corrective action.
On regulation: he says the company confirms compliance regularly with outside counsel, and that its current operations do not require data broker registration.
These are his statements, reported as his account. I have found nothing that contradicts them, and his responsiveness, against the silence of every other company in this story, is noted to his credit.
When Sniper’s site changes again in the coming days, and it has already started, you are reading the explanation in advance, and the before-and-after lives in my archives.
His answer also quietly corroborated something else.
Sniper’s fees are contingent on campaigns the ministries choose to run. Show Faith by Works’ sworn ledger showed zero advertising purchases. And now the platform’s own CEO says no campaigns are running.
Three independent sources, one picture: as of today, in this corner of the pipeline, there is still no documented American ad delivery. Money has moved and paper has moved. The geofence, so far as the record shows, has not fired.
The sentence that stays with me
One line in Roger’s email stood out to me as extremely hopeful, whether he intended it that way or not:
“Any campaign contracted by one of our resellers is executed solely by us, thus giving us the opportunity to confirm compliance with all rules and regulations prior to execution of a campaign.”
He offered it as reassurance, and as reassurance it is genuinely good: a checkpoint exists, and a company that checks.
If the Ministry of Foreign Affairs ever orders campaigns through its registered agent Sniper, the entity that would actually execute the ads, by the platform’s own description of how reselling works, is GeoDataScience of Austin, Texas. Not the mailbox in Wyoming. Not the suite in Deerfield Beach. The boutique with the Conde Nast alum and the NetSuite resume.
Which leaves one question standing at the center of all this, and as of today it is an open one: now that the company knows what its reseller registered to do, would it execute those campaigns if they come?
I have not asked it yet. I wanted to share the answers I’ve found before I go searching for more.
Where things stand
Detailed questions went to Sniper Advertising Services on July 30, to the addresses in its own federal filings, with a response deadline of August 4. I’m not holding my breath, but the fact that their website changed on August 3, the day before their response deadline gives me a little hope.
I’m not saying they were, but if Israel was planning on sneaking some advertising or geotargeting in through the back door, I have notified the bouncer.
Sniper registered promptly and compliantly, and no wrongdoing by Sniper, Refinition, GeoDataScience, or anyone named here is asserted, apart from some copyright issues on Sniper’s former website (I archived it just in case this happened).
It’s pretty amazing what one person can do just by looking into some FARA filings and connecting the dots.
It is a public database. Go read it.
And stay feral, America.
Receipts
Sniper Advertising Services, FARA Registration #7745, Registration Statement (owners, addresses, structure): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7745-Registration-Statement-20260624-1.pdf
Sniper Advertising Services, Exhibit A/B (the oral agreement with the Ministries of Tourism and Foreign Affairs; volume-contingent fees; audience curation): https://efile.fara.gov/docs/7745-Exhibit-AB-20260624-1.pdf
NPR, “Shell Game: 2,000 Firms Based in One Simple House” (2011), on Wyoming Corporate Services, the family at the end of Sniper’s registered agent chain: https://www.npr.org/2011/07/02/137573513/shell-game-2-000-firms-based-in-one-simple-house
Texas Secretary of State, Assumed Name Certificate, filing #804083318 (June 4, 2021): assumed name Refinition; entity GeoDataScience Inc., a Delaware corporation; signed Roger Heaston. Retrievable via SOSDirect.
USPTO trademark serial 97442243, REFINITION (owner records via TSDR): https://tmsearch.uspto.gov/search/search-results/97442243
California Attorney General data broker registry, Refinition, registration #552962 (2022; contact and Austin address): https://oag.ca.gov/data-broker/registration/552962
Statement of Roger Heaston, President and CEO, GeoDataScience Inc. d/b/a Refinition, received by email August 1, 2026, quoted above; on file in full.
The Project 545 Tracker (all eight legs, documents, timeline, money): https://project545.org
The universe gave you nothing for free. You worked hard for what you have found. I appreciate your diligence.