Millions of Brits warned over AI ‘video calls’ duping employees into £20m deepfake scam
MILLIONS of Brits have been warned over fake AI video calls after one deepfake scammed a company out of £20m.
Global engineering firm Arup was the victim of the fraud after an employee was duped into sending the money to criminals.
Arup hires around 18,000 people globally and is the company which provided the engineering services for building the Sydney Opera House, London’s Crossrail, and Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia.
The thieves used an artificial intelligence-generated video to fool the employee into thinking they were on a call with senior officers in the company.
The employee, based in Hong Kong, sent the thieves HK$200m (£20m) after a digitally cloned version of a senior manager asked the employee to send the cash.
The company’s global chief information officer, Rob Greig, said the organisation was subject to frequent attacks including from deepfakes.
He said: “Like many other businesses around the globe, our operations are subject to regular attacks, including invoice fraud, phishing scams, WhatsApp voice spoofing and deepfakes.
“What we have seen is that the number and sophistication of these attacks has been rising sharply in recent months.”
In a statement Arup said it had notified Hong Kong police at the beginning of the year.
It added: “Our financial stability and business operations were not affected and none of our internal systems were compromised.”
Hong Kong police said in a statement that an employee had been “deceived of some HK$200m after she received video conference calls from someone posing as senior officers of the company requesting to transfer money to designated bank accounts”.
It said no arrests had been made but the investigation was ongoing and the case was being classified as “obtaining property by deception”.
The case highlights the threat that deepfake videos and AI can pose to Brits as criminals try and steal their money.
It comes after AI-generated sex images of singer Taylor Swift were circulated on X/Twitter this year.
That’s led to a crackdown by the government who are set to make the creation of deepfake porn illegal.
Those who make sexually explicit fake media without consent will face a criminal record and unlimited fine.
It is already illegal to share deepfake porn without consent — with offenders facing jail — but under the new offence announced today, creating it will also be a crime.
Arup has been approached for comment.
Deepfakes – what are they, and how do they work?
Here's what you need to know...
- Deepfakes are phoney videos of people that look perfectly real
- They’re made using computers to generate convincing representations of events that never happened
- Often, this involves swapping the face of one person onto another, or making them say whatever you want
- The process begins by feeding an AI hundreds or even thousands of photos of the victim
- A machine learning algorithm swaps out certain parts frame-by-frame until it spits out a realistic, but fake, photo or video
- In one famous deepfake clip, comedian Jordan Peele created a realistic video of Barack Obama in which the fake video of the former President called Donald Trump a “dipsh*t”
- In another, the face of Will Smith is pasted onto the character of Neo in the action flick The Matrix. Smith famously turned down the role to star in flop movie Wild Wild West, while the Matrix role went to Keanu Reeves