Deepfakes are no longer used to spread fake information and instead, now companies are also being tricked to send money to new thieves in town. The AI crimes are now a thing and we are more worried than ever.
Recently an incident took place where a convincing deepfake was used to manipulate someone into making it all look convincingly real. According to The Wall Street Journal, the deepfake technology now might also affect the financial status of the people.
Last week, a UK energy company’s chief executive was scammed into sending about $220,000 to a supplier which he believed was boss. A clever thief used a deepfake software to mimic the voice of the executive and demanded the payment within an hour. The deepfake software used not just imitated the voice but also the punctuation and the German accent as well. The money sent to the fake CEO is now gone and according to reports it has been moved through various accounts in Hungary and Mexico and dispersed around the world making it impossible to catch.
Later on, another second request of payment was received from the thieves and the CEO of energy as a precaution called the actual boss which resulted in him handling calls from both the real and fake person. Then he alerted the CEO of the ongoing theft and Euler Hermes declined to state the name of the energy firm or its parent German company as well.
According to reports from Symantec, this is not the first time a company was tricked into wiring a huge amount of money. In reality, more than three similar cases of deepfake voice fraud happened to trick companies which result in the loss of millions of dollars.
Situations like these highlight the risks these Artificial creation of video and audio might put on people and there are no official open communities working to develop software to detect deepfake videos or audios.
The Duplex service of Google uses AI to imitate the voice of a real human being to make phone calls on behalf of users. Many small setups in China are also offering similar services for free on smartphones which sometimes even questions the strategies used to collect data and the privacy policies as well. The researchers of tech companies are working on new strategies to develop deepfake detecting software whereas a part of researchers are also working on techniques to detect the extent to which deepfake can be generated with using a very small amount of data.
The deepfakes are the new viral crimes and they can be dangerous. Thousands of people can be tricked into losing their money with these AI deepfakes and we need to start gathering various tools to prevent this deepfake into spreading across the platforms.
Photo: Getty
Read next: Using Algorithms to Guard Against Deepfakes
Recently an incident took place where a convincing deepfake was used to manipulate someone into making it all look convincingly real. According to The Wall Street Journal, the deepfake technology now might also affect the financial status of the people.
Last week, a UK energy company’s chief executive was scammed into sending about $220,000 to a supplier which he believed was boss. A clever thief used a deepfake software to mimic the voice of the executive and demanded the payment within an hour. The deepfake software used not just imitated the voice but also the punctuation and the German accent as well. The money sent to the fake CEO is now gone and according to reports it has been moved through various accounts in Hungary and Mexico and dispersed around the world making it impossible to catch.
Later on, another second request of payment was received from the thieves and the CEO of energy as a precaution called the actual boss which resulted in him handling calls from both the real and fake person. Then he alerted the CEO of the ongoing theft and Euler Hermes declined to state the name of the energy firm or its parent German company as well.
According to reports from Symantec, this is not the first time a company was tricked into wiring a huge amount of money. In reality, more than three similar cases of deepfake voice fraud happened to trick companies which result in the loss of millions of dollars.
Situations like these highlight the risks these Artificial creation of video and audio might put on people and there are no official open communities working to develop software to detect deepfake videos or audios.
The Duplex service of Google uses AI to imitate the voice of a real human being to make phone calls on behalf of users. Many small setups in China are also offering similar services for free on smartphones which sometimes even questions the strategies used to collect data and the privacy policies as well. The researchers of tech companies are working on new strategies to develop deepfake detecting software whereas a part of researchers are also working on techniques to detect the extent to which deepfake can be generated with using a very small amount of data.
Conclusion
With the updating technologies, there is also an update on the strategies used by hackers and thieves to violate users’ privacy. Deepfakes can make anything look so real that people fail to distinguish the differences. So the AI deepfakes can put a person into an uncompromised situation without even knowing it.The deepfakes are the new viral crimes and they can be dangerous. Thousands of people can be tricked into losing their money with these AI deepfakes and we need to start gathering various tools to prevent this deepfake into spreading across the platforms.
Photo: Getty
Read next: Using Algorithms to Guard Against Deepfakes
