Fraudsters stole about $26 million from a multinational corporation by using fake technology to impersonate company executives, Hong Kong police said on Sunday, in one of the first cases of its kind. man in the city.
A fake is a video or audio recording that is created or altered using artificial intelligence. It has the potential for misinformation and abuse, such as fake images showing people saying things they never said.
An employee of a company in a Chinese financial center received “video conference calls from someone posing as a senior manager of his company, asking him to transfer money to specific bank accounts,” the police agency told AFP.
Police received a report of the incident on January 29th. At this point, around HK$200 million (US$26 million) had already been lost through 15 transfers.
“The investigation is ongoing and there have been no arrests so far,” police said, without revealing the name of the company.
According to Hong Kong media, the victim worked in the finance department and the fraudsters posed as the company's UK-based finance director.
A senior police official, Baron Chan, said the video conference involved several participants but all but the victim were “fake”.
“The scammers found publicly available videos and audios via YouTube and then used hyperfaking technology to imitate their voices… to trick the victim into following their instructions,” Chan told reporters.
The fake videos were pre-recorded and did not contain any dialogue or interaction with the victim, he added.