The 78-year-old London-based architecture and design company Arup has a lot of accolades. With more than 18,000 employees spread over 34 offices worldwide, its accomplishments include designing the renowned Sydney Opera House and Manchester's Etihad Stadium. Currently, it is engaged in building the La Sagrada Familia construction in Spain. It is now the most recent victim of a deepfake scam that has cost millions of dollars.
Earlier this year, CNN Business reported that an employee at Arup's Hong Kong office was duped into a video chat with deepfakes of the company's CFO and other employees. After dismissing his initial reservations, the employee eventually sent $25.6 million (200 million Hong Kong dollars) to the scammers over 15 transactions.
He later realised he had been duped after checking with the design company's U.K. headquarters. The ordeal lasted a week, from when the employee was notified to when the company started looking into the matter.
“We can confirm that fake voices and images were used,” a spokesperson at Arup told a local media outlet. “Our financial stability and business operations were not affected and none of our internal systems were compromised.”
Seeing is no longer the same as believing
The list of recent high-profile targets involving fake images, videos, or audio recordings intended to defame persons has risen with Arup's deepfake encounter. Fraudsters are targeting everyone in their path, whether it's well-known people like Drake and Taylor Swift, companies like the advertising agency WPP, or a regular school principal.
An official at the cryptocurrency exchange Binance disclosed two years ago that fraudsters had created a "hologram" of him in order to get access to project teams.
Because of how realistic the deepfakes appear, they have been successful in defrauding innocent victims. Deepfakes, such as the well-known one mimicking Pope Francis, can go viral and become difficult to manage disinformation when shared on the internet. The latter is particularly troubling since it has the potential to sway voters during a period when several countries are holding elections.
Attempts to defraud businesses have increased dramatically, with everything from phishing schemes to WhatsApp voice cloning, Arup's chief information officer Rob Greig told Fortune.
“This is an industry, business and social issue, and I hope our experience can help raise awareness of the increasing sophistication and evolving techniques of bad actors,” he stated.
Deepfakes are getting more sophisticated, just like other tech tools. That means firms must stay up to date on the latest threat and novel ways to deal with them.
Although deepfakes might appear incredibly realistic, there are ways to detect them.
The most effective approach is to simply ask a person on a video conference to turn—if the camera struggles to get the whole of their profile or the face becomes deformed it's probably worth investigating. Sometimes asking someone to use a different light source or pick up a pencil can assist expose deepfakes.