Deepfake Scam! Hong Kong Firm Loses Rs 207 Cr After Employee Falls Prey To Clones Of Colleagues

Not just invasion of privacy, Deepfake technology has led a company based in Hong Kong to lose a huge amount of money, Rs 207 crore to be precise!

As per reports, scammers made use of advanced deepfake technology to trap an unsuspecting employee of a multinational company.

The incident took place in January when the said employee of the company¡¯s finance department received a message from the company¡¯s UK-based chief financial officer, as per reports.

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What Happened At A Hong Kong Firm?

This was followed by the employee engaging in a video call with the alleged CFO along with other employees of the company. It was only later that the discovery was made that all participants of the call were not real people but products of deepfake personas.

During the call, the employee was instructed to transfer HK $200 million (Rs 207 crore approx) in 15 subsequent transactions. These were made to various Hong Kong bank accounts.

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The insult to the injury was that the fraud remained undetected until a week after the transactions were made. Sensing something fishy, the said employee contacted the company¡¯s headquarters which led to the discovery of the scam.

Without disclosing the specific company¡¯s name or the employees¡¯ details, the Hong Kong police revealed that the scammers generated deepfakes of participants of the video call using video and audio footage that were available online.

Were The Suspects Found?

Unfortunately, the victim employee could not notice the artificial nature of the deepfakes and was hence, fooled.

While the investigation is underway, no suspects have been arrested so far. This highlights the challenges that can be faced while combating such technologically advanced cybercrimes.

Deepfakes videos are slowly becoming a nuisance and a cause of global concern as a recent wave of sexually explicit deepfake videos involving international pop sensation Taylor Swift, Rashmika Mandanna and others have been circulated on platforms like X and Telegram.

This has raised a lot of security as well as privacy concerns in the country.