In-person meetings are bad enough, let alone deep fake Zooms

If you're a little bit distracted, a little bit off your game, it's easy enough to fall for a con. A few months ago, I lost my mind for a few minutes there and almost lost $1,300 in the process. Fortunately, I quickly refound my mind and a quick call to BofA ensured that the $1,300 stayed put in my account. Where (and to whom) it belonged. 

A few year ago, a friend got suckered by a Traveler roof "repair" scam artist. She lost a couple thousand bucks before realizing that there were actually no repairs being made. (This friend is no dummy. She's a professor recently retired from a presitigious university)

So it can happen. 

And now the scammers don't have to rely on spoofed phone numbers (the crooks running the BofA scam that I fell for) or their fast-talking charm (my friend's Traveler). Now they're deploying deep fakes. And now they're after a lot more $1,300 from a sucker's bank account, or a couple thousand bucks for a roof repair that never materializes. 

A hapless worker in Hong Kong thought he was participating in a legitimate zoomish meeting, where one of thhe squares on the screen was occupied by a fake rendering of the company's CFO. On behalf of his organization, he got conned out of $25M 

The elaborate scam saw the worker duped into attending a video call with what he thought were several other members of staff, but all of whom were in fact deepfake recreations, Hong Kong police said at a briefing... 

“(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake,” senior superintendent Baron Chan hun-ching told the city’s public broadcaster RTHK. (Source: CNN)

The employee who got suckered was actually pretty alert and resposible. Earlier, he had receied a suspcious email, supposedly from the company's CFO. He smelled a rat and recognized that the email was a phishing expedition. Because the CFO was in the UK, it wasn't possible for the Hong Kong employee to swing by his office and talk things through. So he was fine when he received an invite to an online get-togehther with Mr. Big and some other senior staff members. 

...the worker put aside his early doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized, Chan said.

Believing everyone else on the call was real, the worker agreed to remit a total of $200 million Hong Kong dollars – about $25.6 million, the police officer added.

The case is one of several recent episodes in which fraudsters are believed to have used deepfake technology to modify publicly available video and other footage to cheat people out of money.

"Publicly available video," you say? Think about the number of corporate meetings floating out there, all those all-hands pronouncements, all those earning reports, all those rah-rahs, all those talking heads. Ripe for the taking.

(Looks like Zoom and WebEx may need to up their security game. Corporations, too. Maybe not be so eager to share their meetings with the general public.)

There've been a number of recent scams of this nature in Hong Kong. Some of them involved stolen ID cards, which were used by scammers deploying facial recognition and other AI technology to create the fake meetings. 

We will, of course, be seeing more and more of this in all realms of life. There's a sexually explicit deep fake Taylor Swift out there. In the run-up to last month's NH primary, robo calls used Joe Biden's voice and words (including one of Joe's faves: malarkey) to give voters misleading info. And now there's a business out a good chunk of change because an employee who was not quite diligent enough got suckered into a deeply fake meeting.

This AI thang is so not going to end well. At minimum, things are going to get a lot worse before they get any better.