How deepfakes affect payment and fraud?
With the deepfake creation technology becoming more easy to use and more accessible, it was just a matter of time when it will be used for payment fraud.
According to the Biometric Update, deepfake claimed it first victims in August this year "with a British energy defrauded of nearly a quarter-million dollars through a wire transfer ordered by what seemed from the voice to be a company executive".
What happened was that the CEO of the company thought he was speaking on the phone with his boss, the chief executive of the firm's German parent company, who asked him to urgently send the funds to a Hungarian supplier, according to the company's insurance firm, Euler Hermes Group SA. The same insurance firm said the fraud was done by using a software that can mimic voice, tonality and punctuation. In the end, no suspects were unfortunately identified, according to the Wall Street Journal, which could pose a big law-enforcement problem in the future as AI crimes have not yet been deeply regulated.
If this happens with voice mimicking, will it affect voice payment market? Luckily, governments and fintechs are already working on developing programs to prevent this kind of fraud. Amazon, Twitter and Facebook have taken steps in deepfake detection. Amazon Web Services has announced it is joining Facebook, Microsoft, academics and other experts to encourage innovation in deepfake detection.