A bank was robbed in Dubai, the loot was 35 million dollars; but behind there was not a band orchestrated by a “Professor” as in the Casa de Papel, but experts in technology deepfake.
The robbery occurred in early 2020, when a bank manager in the UAE took a customer’s call acquaintance and director of a company with whom he had spoken before.
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The businessman said that he was about to make a new acquisition, so he needed the bank to authorize several transfers with a total value of 35 million dollars.
The bank manager confirmed in his inbox the emails of the director of the company and the lawyer in charge, for which the bank manager started making the transfers.
What he did not know was that he had been duped as part of an elaborate scam, in which the thieves had used technology from deepfake to clone the voice of the director you thought you were talking to.
But this was discovered recently, when they tracked down the deposits and found $ 400,000 of stolen funds that entered different accounts in the United States.
The deepfake scam is estimated to have involved at least 17 people, They sent the stolen money to bank accounts around the world.
How do you perform a bank robbery with deepfake?
Basically scammers cloned company CEO voice, using AI-based deepfake technology they cloned the voice they used in the grand bank robbery in the United Arab Emirates, according to investigators in Dubai.
This is one of the uses of new deepfake technology and exploited by cybercriminals. But this is not the first case and it is expected that it will not be the last.
The bank robbery in the United Arab Emirates is the second known case of scammers using deepfake tools for voice modeling and carrying out a robbery.
The first deepfake robbery identified was much more productive than the first, on that occasion The scammers used the technology to impersonate another CEO of a UK-based energy company to steal $ 240,000 in 2019.
If you wonder how cybercriminals clone the voice of company directors, you have to know that they only need a small audio recording with their voice.
This means that if there are recordings of your voice speaking, available online, for example through social networks, Youtube or any other site and you have millionaire accounts in a bank. It is very possible that they could be used to clone your voice via deepfake to empty your accounts.