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According to the local police, scammers have managed to deceive an employee of a Hong Kong multinational with the help of a deepfake video and have more than 23 million euros transferred to them.
As part of the elaborate scam, the finance worker was invited to join a video call with his colleagues. Or at least, that’s what he thought, because in fact it was deepfake recreations, including of the company’s chief financial officer or financial director. “Everyone he saw was fake,” said police spokesman Baron Chan Shun-ching.
Believing that it was a real meeting – everyone looked and sounded just like their real colleagues – the employee agreed to transfer a total of 200 million Hong Kong dollars (more than 23.6 million euros) to an account, which later turned out to be from scammers. The scam was only discovered when the employee later contacted the company’s headquarters (whose name was not disclosed).
It is certainly not the first time that deepfake technology has been used for fraud. At a press conference on Friday, Hong Kong police said they had already made six arrests in connection with similar scams. “Eight stolen ID cards were used to submit 90 loan applications and 54 bank account registrations between July and September last year,” the police spokesperson said. “In addition, deepfakes have already been used at least twenty times to deceive facial recognition programs by imitating people depicted on the identity cards.”
Taylor Swift
The rest of the world is also becoming increasingly concerned about technology. At the end of January, pornographic images of American pop star Taylor Swift, generated by artificial intelligence, were distributed online. The photos, which showed the singer in highly suggestive and explicit positions, were viewed tens of millions of times before being removed from social media platforms.
