NIn what was one of the first cases in the city, the perpetrators of the fraud used technology to pretend to be one of the company's employees.
A “deepfake” is a video or audio recording produced or modified using artificial intelligence. The technique has the potential to generate misinformation, for example it is possible to make people say things they never actually said, or replace people's faces, always in such a perfect way that it is difficult to detect the mistake.
An employee of a company in a Chinese financial center received “video conference calls from someone pretending to be a senior member of his company and asking him to transfer money to certain bank accounts”, said the police cited by the AFP news agency.
Police received a report about the incident on January 29, by which time around $26 million (€24 million) had already been lost through 15 transfers.
“Investigations are still ongoing and to date no arrests have been made,” said the police, without revealing the name of the company.
According to Hong Kong media, the victim worked in the finance department and the criminals pretended to be the company's chief financial officer, based in the United Kingdom.
A senior police official, Baron Chan, said the video conference involved several participants, but all except the victim were pretending to be other people.
“Criminals found publicly available videos and audios on the YouTube network and then used 'deepfake' technology to imitate voices... to trick the victim into following their instructions,” Baron Chan told reporters.
The deepfake videos were pre-recorded and did not involve any dialogue or interaction with the victim, he added.
