Valeriia / stock.adobe.com
The employee of a Chinese financial center in Hong Kong thought he was participating in a meeting with senior company executives when all the participants were “fake” made thanks to artificial intelligence.
Scammers defrauded a multinational company of some $26 million by using deepfake technology to pose as senior company executives, Hong Kong police said on Sunday, in one of the first such cases 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.
An employee of a company in a Chinese financial center received “video conference calls from someone posing as a senior executive at their company asking them to transfer money to designated bank accounts”police told AFP.
All participants in the videoconference were “fake”
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.
Read alsoPornographic deepfakes targeting Taylor Swift raise awareness of the dangers of AI
A senior police official, Baron Chan, said the video conference involved several participants, but that all except the victim were “fake”.
“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.