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According to Hong Kong police, scammers forced a financial employee of a multinational corporation to pay $25 million using a deepfake video of the CFO. Also, several other “employees” participated in the “Videoconference”, who also turned out to be deepfakes.
An employee sensed something was wrong after receiving a message purporting to be from the chief financial officer of a UK-based company. At first he thought it was a phishing scam because the email was about a secret transaction.
However, doubts were dismissed after a video call, during which the other interlocutors seemed to be real colleagues. Believing that everyone else on the call was genuine, the employee agreed to transfer 200 million Hong Kong dollars – about $25.6 million.
Hong Kong police said they have made six arrests in connection with similar scams recently. On at least 20 occasions, police say, artificial intelligence has been used to fool facial recognition programs by imitating people featured on ID cards. Eight stolen Hong Kong IDs were used to process 90 loan applications and register 54 bank accounts between July and September last year.
The scam involving the fake CFO was only discovered when the employee later contacted corporate headquarters. Hong Kong police have not disclosed the company in question or other details of the case.
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