In AI first, voice-mimicking software used in a major heist
- Managing director of British energy company, believing his boss was on the phone, followed orders to wire US$240,000 to an account in Hungary
Thieves used voice-mimicking software to imitate a company executive’s speech and dupe his subordinate into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to a secret account, the company’s insurer said, in a remarkable case that some researchers are calling one of the world’s first publicly reported artificial-intelligence heists.
The managing director of a British energy company, believing his boss was on the phone, followed orders one Friday afternoon in March to wire more than US$240,000 to an account in Hungary, said representatives from the French insurance giant Euler Hermes, which declined to name the company.
The request was “rather strange”, the director noted later in an email, but the voice was so lifelike that he felt he had no choice but to comply.
The insurer, whose case was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, provided new details on the theft to The Washington Post this week, including an email from the employee tricked by what the insurer is referring to internally as “the false Johannes”.
Now being developed by a wide range of Silicon Valley titans and AI start-ups, such voice-synthesis software can copy the rhythms and intonations of a person’s voice and be used to produce convincing speech.
Tech giants such as Google and smaller firms such as the “ultrarealistic voice cloning” start-up Lyrebird have helped refine the resulting fakes and made the tools more widely available for free and unlimited use.
But the synthetic audio and AI-generated videos, known as “deepfakes”, have fuelled growing anxieties over how the new technologies can erode public trust, empower criminals and make traditional communication – from business deals and family phone calls to presidential campaigns – that much more vulnerable to computerised manipulation.