An incident occurred through which an worker of a financial company in Hong Kong lost a big sum of money after being tricked right into a video conference with a fake chief financial officer (CFO) recreated as a deepfake. It was revealed that the group of fraudsters had deceived the victims by recreating the faces of not only the CFO but all employees who attended the video conference using deepfakes.

CNN reported on the 4th (local time) that an worker of a multinational financial company's Hong Kong branch lost 200 million Hong Kong dollars (about 34 billion won) after being deceived in a scam using deepfake technology.

In line with this, an worker working on the Hong Kong branch received an email from the CFO of the headquarters within the UK requesting to secretly send a big sum of cash. The worker initially suspected it was a phishing email since the content was suspicious.

Nevertheless, when he received the identical instructions in a video conference attended by several of his colleagues, he lost his doubts and transferred 200 million Hong Kong dollars. When the worker joined the video conference, he had no doubts because everyone looked and sounded exactly just like the colleagues he knew. I discovered later that it was all a scam.

Following instructions given in the course of the meeting, the worker transferred 200 million Hong Kong dollars 15 times to 5 Hong Kong bank accounts. The fraudsters continued to contact the victim through messenger, email, and video calls until the transfer was made. The AI ​​fraud was discovered only after the worker checked with the corporate headquarters per week later.

Hong Kong police announced that a minimum of 20 cases of fraud using deepfakes were recently discovered. One other six members of the recently arrested fraud group received 90 bank loans and created 54 accounts using deepfake images created by stealing eight lost ID cards between July and September of last yr.

As such, concerns are growing world wide that deepfake technology may be abused in various fields, including financial fraud and elections.

Deepfake, a compound word of deep learning and pretend, manipulates not only photos and videos but additionally voices. A false video with absurd content may be created as if it actually happened.

Specifically, in the USA, an obscene image containing a photograph of pop star Taylor Swift's face was distributed on social media, sparking outrage amongst fans. On the twenty third of last month, ahead of the first election in Recent Hampshire, a deepfake audio was circulated impersonating President Joe Biden and urging local Democratic Party members to not take part in the first.

Reporter Park Chan cpark@aitimes.com