Introducing - Deep Fake

In January 2024, an unlikely worker was summoned to a video call with his boss. Over the next few days, that worker transferred $40 million of the company's money to someone, somewhere.

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The first episode drops Monday, 16th September.

** AI voices have been used extensively in this podcast.** 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:05):
Approache Production. It's January twenty twenty four in the office
of a ROP. Lee Chan not his real name, is
working in his Level five office in downtown Hong Kong.
He works in finance. At about two pm, Lee gets
an email from the London head office. It doesn't seem legit.

(00:29):
He thinks it might be a phishing scam, but over
the next few days he transfers over forty million Australian
dollars to an unknown person or person's welcome to deep
fake the forty million dollar fraud.

Speaker 2 (00:47):
The worker ended up getting persuaded that like no, I'm
talking to a real person. This is legit, right, and
so let's move forward with this deal.

Speaker 1 (00:56):
I'm Amelia Thompson. I've spent the last twelve years digging
into the murky depths of financial crime here in Australia.
I'm covering everything from corporate five fraud to money laundering
schemes that reach the highest levels of power. My name
is Dander and McCullough.

Speaker 3 (01:11):
I have a PhD in cryptology, which is the mathematics
of code.

Speaker 2 (01:19):
The worker initially received an email from what claimed to
be a UK based company's chief financial officer.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
The CFO high Lee, Thanks for coming on the call
so quickly. This is critical business and a transaction that
needs the utmost confidentiality. I'm here to share one of
the fastest growing areas of crime, deep fakes, and how
by twenty twenty seven, they will account for over forty
billion dollars of scams in the US alone.

Speaker 4 (01:46):
You expect like people are just starting to understand what
a deep fake is, and they probably think, as I
thought prior to this story, that it's the sort of
thing where you have to take actual video and then
you take video faces, you train a model. It's complex,
and that eventually.

Speaker 3 (02:01):
There They're becoming more and more frequent, more and more frequently.

Speaker 5 (02:06):
It's very, very hard to identify a deep fate.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
I am not Mormon freeman.

Speaker 4 (02:12):
This is a dangerous time.

Speaker 1 (02:13):
Deep fakes, deep fakes, deep fixts, deep fixed.

Speaker 4 (02:16):
Videos that look so real it's hard to tell what.

Speaker 1 (02:20):
Speak from online pop stars.

Speaker 5 (02:23):
So I'm not the only robot pop star. I was
programmed to believe that I was an eighteen year old
have Brazilian half Spanish girl names with a.

Speaker 1 (02:31):
Deep fake porn.

Speaker 2 (02:32):
It's really heartbreaking that this is happening. And even though
it's a I generated, it's still very real, and it's
still really harms.

Speaker 1 (02:39):
Pick and scams where millions are being lost by the minute.

Speaker 3 (02:42):
I was not surprised at all. We've been talking in
the industry about this is going to be the next
big thing and it was just a matter of time.
So as soon as it happened, I said to my colleagues,
here we go. Here's the first one, and of course
you're going to see a lot more to come.

Speaker 5 (02:57):
But it's created online and shared in the shadows.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
You know.

Speaker 5 (03:01):
I'm still trying to wrap my head around this case
that has emerged in Hong Kong and which is making
global headlines because, like I keep saying, this is chilling.
This sounds like the plot of the fines fiction movie,
except that it's.

Speaker 1 (03:18):
Not deep fake. The forty million Dollar Fraud. Subscribe now
to Apple podcast Subscriptions to get episodes ad free and early.
The first episode drops Monday, September sixteenth.

Speaker 3 (03:30):
The use of AI voices has been used in this
podcast to help recreate some moments