In a first-of-its-kind scam, a global corporation lost $25.6 million to a deepfake video conference call in which a digitally produced avatar of the chief financial officer (CFO) directed money transfers.
Scammers tricked employees at the business’s Hong Kong office by using digitally manipulated versions of the CFO and other company officials in a video chat where “everyone looked real.”
According to South China Morning Post, every person present during the video calls—aside from the victim—was a fictitious depiction of an actual person.
According to the investigation, “the scammers used deepfake technology to create convincing versions of the meeting’s participants out of publicly available video and other footage.”
According to police, this is the first time scammers have been known to trick financial authorities with deepfakes.
“It appears that everyone you see in a multi-person video chat is false this time,” acting senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching was cited as saying.
The targeted employee recognized the caller’s appearance and voice as genuine corporate representatives.
They executed 15 payments totaling HK$200 million ($25.6 million) to five Hong Kong bank accounts as instructed at the meeting.
Chan claimed that “they used deepfake technology to imitate their targets’ voice reading from a script.”
Recently, deepfake pornography of singer Taylor Swift gained widespread attention. The X platform, owned by Elon Musk, banned searches for Swift, preventing people from searching for her name for a few days after the release of graphic, photoshopped pictures of her.
