A videoconference meeting between a worker and the executive team of his company has resulted in a loss of about 200 million Hong Kong dollars – about 24 million euros – as it turned out to be a scam in which computer technology was used. deepfake.
The worker was summoned to an online conference with members of his company, including the director of finance. According to the South China Morning Post, the victim of the scam recognized her superiors both by her image and voice, so she agreed to execute the orders sent to her. In this case, she was urged to make a million-dollar transfer.
But, even acknowledging his superiors, the protagonist of this story was suffering from a scam. The cyber scammers made use of artificial intelligence technology to impersonate the identities of these executives and gain the trust of the worker, the only real person on this call. It took the employee a week to realize that it was a scam, after asking about it at the company headquarters, whose name has not yet been revealed. During this time, the cyber scammers were in contact with him through messages.
The worker has stated that he had doubts and that it was a confusing meeting: the participants did not interact with him and it seemed that they were just reading a script. It turned out that both the images and the videos and voices of the managers were recreated from pieces of presentations and talks published on the Internet. These same scammers had already tried to defraud several workers of this company, although no details of those attempts have been revealed.
But what is deepfake and why can it be so dangerous? It is a deep manipulation of audiovisual content (images, videos, audios) with advanced artificial intelligence tools that stand out for the realism of their results. In this case, cybercriminals used it to impersonate the image of the financial director and other executives of the subsidiary.
These identity thefts can have very negative effects and cause serious harm to the victims of the network, although it has also been seen as well used, this technology gives a universe of possibilities to explore new ways of making fiction or music, for example. The world has already been able to listen to deepfake songs by Bad Bunny or Bad Gyal on networks, with surprisingly positive results. Furthermore, this technology has allowed icons such as Lola Flores or Camarón de la Isla to ‘revive’.
