According to the South China Morning Post, a deepfake video purportedly showed the imposter as the company’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), and it stole over $25.6 million (more than Rs 200 crore) from the victimized organization. In a conference call, the imposter requested a money transfer. He made an avatar of the company’s CFO and other executives, deceiving the staff into thinking he was the genuine person on the conference call. The employees said that they sounded as authentic as they looked.
According to the report, scammers utilized deepfake technology to transform publicly available video and other footage into convincing versions of the meeting’s participants. This marked the first instance, as per the Hong Kong Police, where scammers employed deepfake technology to deceive a financial agency. Acting senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching noted, “This time, in a multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone you see is fake.” Furthermore, he mentioned, “They used deepfake technology to imitate the voice of their targets reading from a script.”
During the conference call, employees were directed to execute 15 transfers totaling HK$200 million or $25.5 million to five different Hong Kong bank accounts.
