Swift, Biden, & the $25M scam | Protecting your employees in the era of deepfakes

Earlier in February, HR Grapevine shared the story of a global organization that lost $25 million to scammers after an employee received instructions from their CFO on a video call that turned out to be entirely deepfaked.

Baron Chan Shun-ching, Acting Superintendent of the Hong Kong Police Force, where the employee works, stated the deepfake was created using publicly available audio and video.

Wishing to alert the public to these “new deception tactics,” Chan warned that this type of scam marked a development in the sophistication of deepfake technology. “In the past, we would assume these scams would only involve two people in one-on-one situations, but we can see from this case that fraudsters are able to use AI technology in online meetings, so people must be vigilant even in meetings with lots of participants," he said.

As well as greater sophistication, we are now seeing more cases of deepfake scams – the Hong Kong Police Force says it has investigated 20 cases of such AI-enabled fraud – and other dangerous applications of deepfake technology are becoming prevalent.