Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – An employee at a Hong Kong multinational financial firm became a victim of fraud. In fact, his account was drained to US$ 25.6 million or Rp. 393 billion.
This fraud mode involves deepfake technology which has become widespread due to the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. Deepfake is a technique of modifying or creating visual content in the form of photos and videos with the help of AI.
Meanwhile, the results of the deepfake tool concoction can be very realistic and difficult to distinguish from the real thing. In Indonesia, Indonesian President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) was once a victim of a deepfake.
The video of Jokowi's speech in Mandarin went viral on the internet and caused controversy. In fact, the video is a deepfake made by AI.
Returning to the case of fraud that caused losses to a financial employee, the fraudster's method was to use deepfakes and pretend to be the company's CFO.
Hong Kong police said the fake CFO made a video conference call. The victim who took part in the video call saw that there were many other employees joining the conference.
“It turns out that everyone in the video call was fake,” said Baron Cahn Shun-ching, a member of the Hong Kong police.
Before participating in the video call, the victim received an email that seemed to come from the CFO of the UK branch of the company. In the email, it was stated that the Hong Kong branch company needed to carry out confidential transactions.
Actually, the victim already suspects that this is phishing. However, after joining the video call and seeing that other employees were there, he was convinced that the email was true.
He finally agreed to transfer HKD 200 million or around US$ 25.6 million, police officials said.
This is not the first case of fraud utilizing deepfakes to trick victims. Hong Kong police said they had made 6 arrests related to similar fraud.
[Gambas:Video CNBC]
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