A finance employee at a multinational company in Hong Kong was defrauded of $25 million by people impersonating his boss with “deepfake” technology.
According to Hong Kong police, a group of fraudsters lured a finance employee into a video conference. The fraudsters used ‘deepfake’ technology to pose as the company’s finance director and other executives.
“Apparently everyone he saw in the videoconference was fake,” Commissioner Baron Chan Shun-ching told public broadcaster RTHK.
Chan said he became suspicious after receiving an email from the finance chief of the worker’s company in Britain about a “secret money transfer” and thought the email was fake.
According to police, the worker was later convinced that the email was genuine because the people on the videoconference looked and sounded just like his coworkers.
Accordingly, the worker accepted the secret money transfer and gave a total of $25.6 million to the fraudsters.
The worker realized he had been defrauded after reporting the matter to the company’s management.
