Despite less than two years since the rise of Artificial Intelligence and the emergence of apps and platforms driven by this technology for all kinds of uses, unfortunately we have already seen that AI can be dangerous for users, thanks to the facilities and uses that cybercriminals can take advantage of.
Although this technology offers endless possibilities, as we mentioned, it is also exploited by criminals to carry out their scams, tricks, and thefts. There have been many stories that we have heard about how they exploit AI for this, but the one we just learned about that happened in Singapore a few weeks ago may be the most advanced to date.
It all started when an employee of a bank in Singapore received an email from the CEO asking the worker to transfer hundreds of millions of company funds to a foreign bank account.
Naturally, this sounded strange and suspicious to the employee, as it was a rather unusual request, in addition to being a very large amount of money. To make sure, the employee replied to the CEO asking if they could meet in person and explain clearly what he had to do.
In response, the CEO said it was impossible as he was out of the office, but they could arrange a video call where other employees would be present to explain the reasons and how to transfer the money.
The employee agreed, and after 15 minutes, he received an invitation to connect to the video call. When he opened it, he found that indeed the CEO was there, as well as several other employees, all of whom he knew personally.
After more than 20 minutes of conversation, in which the CEO explained how many millions had to be transferred and the foreign account they had to go to, the employee decided to follow the boss’s guidelines and moved the hundreds of millions as instructed.
But a few hours after making this millionaire move, the alarms went off in the bank – they had been scammed. As suspected from the beginning by the employee, the contact was not the CEO but a cybercriminal who used AI to recreate his face in the video call.
However, the most surreal and alarming part of this story is that not only was the CEO impersonated by a virtual puppet that was identical to him, but all the colleagues who appeared in the video call were also bots powered by AI.
It is important to emphasize that the employee knew all these people personally, and yet they managed to be deceived by AI bots during a video call of over 20 minutes. If we thought we were still in the early stages of this era (which we are), the future looks very dangerous because it will be impossible to distinguish between fiction and reality.
