A multinational corporation’s finance director in Singapore just escaped losing US$670,000 after he fell victim to scammer that used a deepfake Zoom call from the CFO to convince him to send a massive wire transfer.
The fraud was reported in an article in the Strait Times.
The elaborate fraud would have went through had the scammers not gotten too greedy and tried to get an additional $1.4 million from him which tripped off red flags. The fraud department at HSBC kicked into action and managed to freeze the funds with authorities.
The Scammers Cleverly Made Him Sign An NDA
The scam began on March 24th when the Finance Director got a WhatsApp messages from someone posing as the company’s CFO. The “CFO” told him that needed to participate in an urgent video conference about some secretive business restructuring that was going to happen soon.
To make it seem legitimate, the CFO introduced him to a lawyer who informed him that the project was highly secretive and he would need to sign an NDA. This was a clever way to make sure that the victim would not speak to any of his colleagues about the transaction.
A Deepfake Zoom Call Was The Final Touch
After the Finance Director signed the NDA, he was instructed that a Zoom call would take place with the CEO and other executives at the company.
When he joined the Zoom call, the executives were all present (including the CEO), but little did he know they were just deepfakes.
During the call he was instructed to wire transfer $499,000 to an acccount. That wire transfer was sent to a mule account. Almost immediately, $494,000 was transferred out to banks in Hong Kong, and $5,000 was left in the mule account as payment.
3 Days Later The Scammers Returned For More Money
On March 27th, the scammers got greedy and returned to get more money from the victim. This time they wanted $1.4 million transferred to an account. It was at that point that he notified HSBC (their bank) to try to recover the funds from the original wire transfer.
The bank worked with authorities to freeze the funds in the Hong Kong bank account as well as the $5,000 that was left in the money mule account.
Thanks to the great work by HSBC’s fraud department, the scam funds were frozen, but these deepfake scams are going to result in many high profile BEC attacks like this very soon.
Malicious AI Is Going To Result in Billions More In Fraud
According to Deloitte , AI will enable an incremental $10 billion in reported fraud by the end of 2025.
