Scammers Use Deepfakes To Steal $25M
A Hong Kong finance company employee was tricked into transferring $25 million to scammers using a deepfake video of his CFO, marking Hong Kong's first deepfake video conference scam.
Amazing story that seems just a taste of what’s coming. Scammers used a deepfake video of an employee’s CFO in a video conference to convince him to transfer $25M USD in 15 separate transactions to accounts they controlled. The victim initially felt something was wrong, but his suspicions were allayed when other colleagues appeared to join the call. Police believe the deepfake was trained on past legitimate video conferences and was probably driven by DeepFaceLive, the real-time version of the open-source software that powers most of the deepfakes on the internet. The scam was uncovered only after the victim contacted his company's head office. This is the first reported scam of this type in Hong Kong.