AI can clone bosses’ voices and faces to carry out fraud

Artificial intelligence can now imitate a person’s face, voice and manner of speaking in real time, making convincing scams easier to stage, DR reports. Experts advise treating requests to transfer money with caution and verifying them through a separate channel.

A scammer could call an employee posing as their boss and ask them to transfer a large sum to a new investor. The request could then be repeated in a video meeting featuring realistic-looking and sounding colleagues, tech analyst Marcel Mirzaei-Fard told DR.

The risk is not hypothetical: last week, the voice of Lars Sandahl, chief executive of the Confederation of Danish Industry, was misused in an attempted scam. He told DR the effort was convincing enough that it could have fooled his own mother.

Mirzaei-Fard said it is easy and inexpensive to clone someone’s voice and make it say things they never said, though such scams are still not especially common. “This is no longer science fiction,” he said.

In a demonstration for DR, Peder Hammerskov, head of the Centre for AI at the Danish School of Media and Journalism, cloned journalist Jacob Jørgensen’s voice in less than two minutes. Aalborg University artificial intelligence professor Thomas B. Moeslund said scams have become easier to carry out. A longer recording can help produce a more convincing imitation, including by matching a person’s dialect.

Moeslund said companies could require two colleagues to approve payments. The Confederation of Danish Industry’s cybersecurity adviser recommends never making payments based only on a spoken instruction, and requiring more than one approval for payments to new creditors or changes to account details. Employees should call back using a number from the company directory if they have doubts, and raise concerns with management or IT even if a request is described as confidential. Suspected scam attempts should be reported to police.

Police advise people to agree on a code word with family and friends in person, to help identify callers pretending to be someone they know. They also say not to share personal information or transfer money over the phone.