Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’

A finance worker at a multinational firm was tricked into paying out $25 million to fraudsters using deepfake technology to pose as the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call, according to Hong Kong police.

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing on Friday.

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK.

Chan said the worker had grown suspicious after he received a message that was purportedly from the company’s UK-based chief financial officer. Initially, the worker suspected it was a phishing email, as it talked of the need for a secret transaction to be carried out.

However, the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said.

At some point someone’s going to train an LLM on material from successful scams to autonomously generate new scams, then wire the money to server farms to run more copies of itself.

The scam involving the fake CFO was only discovered when the employee later checked with the corporation’s head office.

A surprise teleconference resulting in the transfer of $25 million dollars? You can bet your ass I'm going to verify that transaction by calling the CFO on his direct line before any money is sent.