UK engineering firm Arup falls victim to 20m deepfake scam

The British engineering company Arup has confirmed it was the victim of a deepfake fraud after an employee was duped into sending HK 200m ( 20m) to criminals by an artificial intelligence-generated video call. Hong Kong police said in February that a worker at a then-unnamed company had been tricked into transferring vast sums by people on a hoax call "posing as senior officers of the company". Arup said in a statement that it was the company involved, confirming that at the beginning of the year it had "notified the police about an incident of fraud in Hong Kong". It confirmed that fake voices and images were used. It added: "Our financial stability and business operations were not affected and none of our internal systems were compromised."