Million-dollar deepfake scam is carried out in Hong Kong

That the deepfake It's an incredible technology, no one disputes it, and since its inception, much has been said about its potential, both positive and negative. This week, we had a sample of how it can be used by criminals to carry out the most diverse scams.

An employee of a Hong Kong company was deceived by fraudsters who used deepfakes of his bosses and colleagues to carry out a scam, causing losses of around US$25 million. See below how the fraud occurred.

Understand what deepfake is and its potential

The deepfake uses images of a person that are analyzed using artificial intelligence. With this, it is able to replace one person's features with another, in real time. This technology has already been widely used to create humorous satire, but it has also been applied to scams.

The tool is so powerful that it can even imitate a person's voice and replicate it, if there are enough speech samples from the identity that is replacing the person in the new video. With the improvement of technology, the potential of the AI-managed tool — both positive and negative — is increasing, making the effect increasingly realistic and difficult to detect by potential victims of digital crimes.

If on the one hand the deepfake can be used to perform true miracles, such as bringing famous figures “back to life”, in the way that shows with Michael Jackson, Tupac and even Freddy Mercury were performed in the past — not to mention the effect of rejuvenating an actor in a film, such as in Indiana Jones and the Relic of Destiny, or in The Mandalorian, where a young version of the character Luke Skywalker made a cameo in the second season, based on images obtained from various scenes from the franchise's films released in the 1980s — its potential for crime demands a warning from technology companies and authorities .

How the coup in Hong Kong happened

In Hong Kong, a multinational company — whose name was not disclosed by the police — was the victim of a scam carried out through the deepfake, generating losses of more than 25 million dollars, according to a report from CNN.

In the case of the crime in Hong Kong, everything happened during a video conference, in which the company's financial sector employee thought he was talking to several team members, including his own boss. However, all the participants were fake, as reported by Baron Chan Shun-ching, the superintendent of the multinational.

On the same day, shortly before the video call, the victim of the scam was already suspicious because he had received an email in the name of his boss asking for a secret transfer to be made. The boy suspected it was a fake email, but after the meeting he ended up putting aside his suspicions, as everyone at the conference looked and spoke like their colleagues, interacting with each other in a natural and convincing way.

The employee went ahead and transferred 200 million Hong Kong dollars, which is equivalent to 25,6 million US dollars. Only later did he realize that he had been deceived, when he went to confirm with the company's headquarters, located in the United Kingdom. It was only after both sides carried out a meticulous examination of the video that the deception came to light, exposing the employee's error and the very serious crime committed by the criminals.

The police investigation

According to the police, this is not the first case of scammers using the deepfake to commit digital crimes, taking publicly available videos and altering them to carry out similar scams. During the press conference that took place last Friday, Hong Kong police said that they had already arrested six people linked to schemes similar to those in the news.

Hong Kong Police Senior Inspector Tyler Chan Chi-wing expressed to citizens the need to be extra careful not to fall into traps similar to the one in this case, so that there is careful scrutiny before transactions are made after contact where fraud may be occurring. According to the inspector, the country's payment transfer system will undergo reinforcement, in an attempt to contain the actions of criminals in the future.

Chan also said that eight Hong Kong identification cards had been reported stolen to the police, and that they were used to make 90 loan applications and 54 bank account openings between July and September last year.

And there's more: on at least 20 different occasions, police said scammers used security technology deepfake to try to circumvent facial recognition systems using photos of these stolen documents. There are so many cases and they are growing at a very fast pace, which worries the authorities, as they are not able to contain the danger of misuse of technology against all types of companies and to deceive people with blackmail and other types of crimes. serious.

It is worth noting that those responsible for the scam in the news have not yet been located, nor has the amount returned to the company that was a victim of the criminals. The Hong Kong police continue to investigate the case and despite the information provided by the employee, they still have no clue as to the identity(ies) of the person(s) responsible for the stunt. 

In fact, in January of this year, the security agency in England had already issued a statement in which it commented on the enormous difficulty that its investigators have been having in trying to separate fake videos from real ones, and that the uncontrolled proliferation of criminal use of the deepfake was increasing cases of password and private information theft scams at an alarming rate, issuing a general alert to users not only in the country, but across the rest of the globe.

This is not an isolated case this week, which shows the frightening potential of technology, as was seen last year during the primary elections in New Hampshire, in the United States, where President Joe Biden's voice was copied and used in campaign calls. .

However, the big headline in newspapers around the world was the confusion involving the artist Taylor Swift and the thousands of fake images in explicit sexual situations, created with her identity and posted on Elon Musk's social network, a story that we commented on this week's Trio.

Watch the video on the Showmetech channel:

SEE MORE:

What the first Apple Vision Pro reviews say

Source: CNN, The Economic Times, The Guardian, Wikipedia

reviewed by Glaucon Vital in 6 / 2 / 24.