Deepfakes complicate identity theft; here’s how fraud examiners can fight back

Since the earliest known deepfake attack in 2019, anti-fraud professionals across the globe have witnessed the rapid development of artificial intelligence to enhance schemes involving identity theft. The author traces the evolution of AI-assisted identity theft attacks through three high-profile deepfake schemes and details methods and tools that fraud examiners must add to their cybersecurity arsenals to fight back.

The CEO of a U.K. energy company was certain he’d talked to the head of his firm’s parent company in Germany. He recognized his boss’s German accent and lilt over the phone, so when the boss urgently instructed him to transfer 220,000 euros ($243,000) to the company’s supplier in Hungary, the CEO didn’t hesitate. But what the CEO thought was a request to pay a vendor became the earliest known deepfake attack against a company. Deepfakes are synthetic media creations in which a person’s image or voice is swapped with another person’s voice or likeness. In this scheme, which occurred in 2019, fraudsters cloned the German executive’s voice with artificial intelligence (AI).