Deepfake technology has reached a point where it’s not just applicable to still images and videos – the latter being a hot topic after the face of songstress Taylor Swift began appearing in pornographic video that she clearly never starred in – but also in real-time scenarios, like conference calls. Such was the case one unfortunate employee who got duped into handing over US$25 million (~RM119 million) to people she thought were her real colleagues during the “con” call.
As per SCMP’s report, the victim is an employee who reportedly works in a Hong Kong-based multinational company, who says that it started out as an email they received, asking them to sit in for a video call. During the call, the employee was instructed to transfer the US$25 million to several bank accounts across 15 transfers. It wasn’t until a week after the incident and they had contacted its headquarters that they were a victim of a deepfake scam.
Lending even more to the authenticity of the deepfake call, the employee said that everyone present in the meeting all looked and sounded like individuals that they knew, working in the company. However, the only real person in that virtual conference was them. The company has since made an official report to the police.
“They used deepfake technology to imitate the voice of their targets reading from a script,” said acting senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching. He added that in similar crimes involving deepfakes, the victims took part in one-on-one video calls with a fake person. Chan also mentioned that between two to three workers in the same branch had been approached by the same scammers, but only one of them fell victim.
Again, deepfake technology isn’t groundbreaking, having been around for years. To explain it in layman terms, it is the act of superimposing the face of a person on to the face of another, as well as using AI to make it match facial movements to the model it is overlaid on. The most common use of the technology online are typically found in pornographic videos, whereby the face of a popular actor or actress is placed on the face of an AV star, usually with a voluptuous and alluring body.
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