A multinational company lost HKD 200 million or around Rp. 401.8 billion due to fraud using deepfake technology. Oopss!

The incident began when an employee from the company’s Hong Kong branch office admitted to receiving a suspected phishing message in mid-January, claiming to be from the CFO of the UK-based head office.

In the message he was asked to carry out a secret transaction, but the victim did not immediately believe him. Then he was invited to join a video conference call attended by the CFO and a number of other employees, which was later revealed to be a deepfake fake meeting.

The meeting participants were all fraudsters who used deepfakes. The victim was the only real employee at the meeting, as quoted by Open-ai from the South China Morning Post, Monday (5/2/2024).

The deepfake video used was created using various publicly available videos to disguise the fraudster’s face. During the meeting the victim was ordered to transfer money 15 times to five bank accounts in Hong Kong. The total loss reached HKD 200 million.

According to local police, this is the first deepfake case they have handled with large losses. They did not reveal complete information about the company or employees who were victims.

Senior superintendent Baron Chan Shun-ching said that in previous cases, this deepfake fraud was only carried out in one-on-one video calls, not conference calls.

“This time, it was in a video conference containing many people, and it turned out that everything seen was fake,” explained Chan.

He also said that the fraudsters used images that were very similar to the person they were impersonating, even their voices were similar.