Deepfake Scammers Trick Employee Into Sending Out 25M Dollars

Deepfake scammers tricked an employee at an international company into sending out an amount in excess of $25 million in firm funds in a complex ploy involving an online video meeting, where numerous company executives were impersonated, Cointelegraph reported.

What are deepfakes?

Deepfakes are a type of synthetic media in which a person's likeness in existing images or videos is replaced with someone else's likeness using advanced machine learning techniques. These techniques often involve deep learning algorithms, particularly generative adversarial networks (GANs), to create highly realistic fake videos or images.

A fake high-level meeting

Hong Kong police representative Baron Chan said the incident dates from last month, when the staff member got a fake message from the company’s chief financial officer. The CFO invited him to discuss a private transaction on video.

The criminals used a few deepfaked company executives to convince the employee to carry out more than a dozen transactions with firm funds, worth $25.5 million in total.

Chan shared that the scammers probably used previous footage of the company’s executives to create the deepfakes. He suspects they downloaded videos in advance and then added fake voices using AI, which were applied in the video conference. The people in the video were identical to their real-life counterparts.

The first of many cases?

The cheated employee found out the call had been fake after talking to the firm’s head office. According to Hong Kong police, this is the first case of its kind in the city-state, but deepfake scams are on the rise throughout the region. Chan warned that people should exercise caution “even in meetings with lots of participants.”

Deepfakes are an issue in the US too

After deepfake photos of Taylor Swift were circulated, the technology caught the attention of US lawmakers. Politician Joe Morelle has proposed measures to criminalize the generation of deep fake images in the US.