Finance Worker Duped Into $25M Transfer by Deepfake AI

A finance worker at a global firm was duped into transferring $25 million to scammers using deepfake AI technology, CNN reported.

At a briefing on Friday, Hong Kong police said that the worker was tricked into attending a video call with what he thought was the company's chief financial officer and several other staff members. All of them were actually deepfake fabrications, however.

"(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake," senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told public broadcaster RTHK.

According to Chan, the worker was initially suspicious after receiving a message that was supposedly from the company's chief financial officer in the United Kingdom. The message talked about a secret transaction that needed to be conducted, so the worker suspected it was a phishing email.

His early concerns were put aside when the other people on the video call looked and sounded just like his colleagues, Chan reportedly said.

Believing that the AI-generated representations were real, the worker then agreed to pay out a total of $200 million Hong Kong dollars, which is about $25.6 million, the police officer added.

The incident is part of a growing trend in which criminals have used deepfake technology to alter publicly-available data to defraud people.

Hong Kong police announced the arrest of six people in connection with similar schemes at the press briefing on Friday.

Between July and September, eight stolen Hong Kong identity cards that had been reported lost were used to submit 90 loan applications and register 54 bank accounts, Chan said.

According to police, AI deepfakes were used in at least 20 instances to deceive facial recognition programs by emulating the people pictured on the identity cards.

The fraudulent transaction involving the fake CFO was only discovered when the worker later verified the details with the company's headquarters.

Hong Kong police did not disclose the identities of the worker or the company.

The nefarious uses of deepfake technology became apparent last month when pornographic, AI-generated images of pop star Taylor Swift were released on social media.

The explicit images, which showed the singer in sexually suggestive positions, were reportedly viewed tens of millions of times before social media platforms took them down.

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