The story is barely believable. Scammers defrauded a multinational of some $26 million using deepfake technology to pose as senior company executives, Hong Kong police reported on Sunday (February 5), in one of the first cases of this type in the city.
A deepfake is a video or audio recording made or modified using artificial intelligence. It has the potential for misinformation and misuse, such as deepfake images showing people saying things they never said.
A fake financial director
An employee of a company in a Chinese financial center received “video conference calls from someone posing as a senior manager of his company asking him to transfer money to designated bank accounts”, the court said. police at the AFP.
Police received a report of the incident on January 29, by which time some HK$200 million (US$26 million) had already been lost via 15 transfers.
“Investigations are still ongoing and no arrests have been made so far,” police said, without disclosing the name of the company. The victim worked in the finance department and the scammers posed as the company’s UK-based finance director, according to Hong Kong media.
A senior police officer, Baron Chan, said the video conference involved several participants, but that all of them, except the victim, were “fake”. “The scammers found publicly available videos and audios via YouTube, then used deepfake technology to imitate their voices… in order to trick the victim into following their instructions,” Chan told reporters. The deepfake videos were pre-recorded and did not involve any dialogue or interaction with the victim, he added.