It starts with the fraudster hijacking an identity, for example from a LinkedIn profile with a photo and relevant experience. Then the fraudster creates a CV from it and sends it to the employer. Once the fraudster is called for a remote interview, he uses a deepfake of this person in real time and can thus trick him into the job with bad intentions.
– In some cases you never meet these candidates. Often it can be about consultants, for example who are hired for a temporary period, perhaps from outside because there is a large skills shortage in certain areas and those areas are, for example, IT security, says Charlotte Ulvros, marketing and digital manager at the recruitment company TNG Group .
What the fraudster is after is business data, to get into internal data systems, plant malware or viruses in the systems in order to later blackmail the companies so that they start paying money.
– But there are also fraudsters who are looking to steal a lot of information in, for example, espionage, says Charlotte Ulvros.
The FBI has warned
There is a case in the US where a company hired a person who had pretended to be someone else using deepfake. It then turned out that the person in question came from North Korea and had installed malware in the company’s system. As early as 2022, the FBI issued a warning for exactly this type of fraud.
No known cases in Sweden
There are no known cases where this fraud method has been used against Swedish companies yet. But recruitment companies want to warn about the phenomenon so that no one falls victim to this due to not knowing that the method exists.
– That it can come to Sweden is absolutely not a utopia. We can only hope that it stays away for as long as possible, says Lotta Mauritzson, crime prevention officer at the police’s national fraud centre.
Police tip
– As far as the company is concerned, they need to take this into account in their risk assessment. You need to introduce routines that combine the digital with the physical world. That’s probably the only way to deal with this, says Lotta Mauritzson.