A rich businessman in Singapore was going to have a very bad day.
A Zoom invitation arrived on his phone and it looked like the kind of message that a well-connected businessman might actually receive.
The sender of the message was the Secretary of the Cabinet, and he was inviting him to a private meeting with Prime Minister Lawrence Wang. He had been chosen, because of his prior dealings with government officials, to take part in a confidential session about a foreign policy emergency.
He jumped at the chance, and accepted the meeting. The only problem? The messages were all fake.
A $4.9 Million Dollar Mistake
The businessman jumped on the Zoom call and it would look as you might expect.
He saw the prime minister. He saw President Tharman Shanmugaratnam. He saw Minister Indranee Rajah, officials from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Canada’s foreign minister, an advisor to the president of the United Arab Emirates, and representatives from BlackRock and the Dubai International Financial Centre.
But it wasn’t real. All of it was deepfaked and he was about to get duped.
By the end of the call, the businessman had agreed to wire 4.9 million Singapore dollars to help the government handle “an urgent crisis in the Strait of Hormuz.”
After the call, a man claiming to be a lawyer reached out and walked him through the wire transfer.
The scammers told him the money would be returned within 15 days. It was only later, when he tried to follow up with the real Secretary to the Cabinet, that he learned that he was defrauded.
The Singapore Police Released The Video
The video, released by police, shows the full deepfake call in motion. It is worth watching, if only to see how close the line between real and fake has now become.
Check it out here.
There are some red flags in this video worth mentioning.
The audio does not sync properly with the speakers’ lips. The voices appear to come from a single account rather than from individual participants. The Zoom logo is partly cut off in places, and the backgrounds behind the officials looked distorted.
This is a low tech deepfake. Imagine when they get better.
