Scammers deepfake CEO's voice to talk underling into $243,000 transfer

Any business in its right mind should be painfully aware of how much money they could bleed via skillful Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams, where fraudsters convincingly forge emails, invoices, contracts and letters to socially engineer the people who hold the purse strings. And any human in their right mind should be at least a little freaked out by how easy it now is to churn out convincing deepfake videos – including, say, of you, cast in an adult movie, or of your CEO saying things that… well, they would simply never say. Well, welcome to a hybrid version of those hoodwinks: deepfake audio, which was recently used in what's considered to be the first known case of an AI-generated voice of a CEO to bilk a UK-based energy firm out of €220,000 (USD $243,000). The Wall Street Journal reports that some time in March, the British CEO thought he had gotten a call from the CEO of his business's parent company, which is based in Germany. Whoever placed the call sounded legitimate.