(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) A Hong Kong company lost the equivalent of over $25 million from a sophisticated scam using deep-fake technology, Ars Techinica reported.
The scammers digital replicated the voice of the company’s chief financial officer’s, along with those of other top level employees, during an online meeting. In it, they issued instructions for an employee to transfer the money 200 million Hong Kong dollars in a series of 15 transactions to five local bank accounts.
All participants in the video chat except the victim appeared to have been digitally created.
According to a police statement, the employee was initially skeptical of the order after receiving email instructions to transfer the money, but she was convinced after the video call that the order was real.
“Police received a report from a staff member of a company on 29 January that her company was deceived of some HK$200m after she received video conference calls from someone posing as senior officers of the company requesting to transfer money to designated bank accounts,” said the statement.
Hong Kong police have declined to release further details at this time, electing to withhold the names of both the victim and the company.
Baron Chan Shun-ching, the acting senior superintendent of Hong Kong’s Cyber Security and Technology Crime Bureau, noted that artificial intelligence was likely used to pull of the heist.
“[The fraudster] invited the informant [clerk] to a video conference that would have many participants,” Chan said, noting that AI likely served to make the voices of the company’s officials sound realistic.
“Because the people in the video conference looked like the real people, the informant … made 15 transactions as instructed,” Chan added. However, “… it turns out that everyone was fake.”
The prevalence and dangers of AI deep-fakes have been of increasing concern to political authorities in recent months.
From Satanists using AI to try to defame Hobby Lobby to the rise of deepfake “sextortion,” it appears that the new technology may make human life as it has been implausible.
