WASHINGTON • 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 (AI) 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 €220,000 (S$336,600) to an account in Hungary, said representatives from French insurer Euler Hermes, which declined to name the company.
The request was "rather strange", the director noted later in an e-mail, 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 on Wednesday, including an e-mail from the employee tricked.
Such voice synthesis software can copy the rhythms and intonations of a person's voice and be used to produce convincing speech. Tech giants like Google and smaller firms such as "ultra-realistic voice cloning" start-up Lyrebird have helped refine the resulting fakes and made the tools more widely available for free use. The synthetic audio and AI-generated videos, known as "deepfakes", have fuelled growing anxiety over how the new technologies can erode public trust, empower criminals and make traditional communication that much more vulnerable to computerised manipulation.
Euler Hermes representatives said the company, a Britain-based subsidiary of a German energy firm, contacted law enforcement.
The director first got a call in March, and the voice demanded he urgently wire money to a supplier in Hungary to help save the company in late payment fines. The fake executive referred to the director by name and sent the financial details over e-mail.
The director and his boss had spoken directly a number of times, said Euler Hermes spokesman Antje Wolters, who noted that the call was not recorded. "The software was able to imitate the voice, and not only the voice: the tonality, the punctuation, the German accent," she said.
After the thieves made a second request, the director grew suspicious and called his boss directly.
Then the thieves called back, unravelling the ruse: The "fake 'Johannes' was demanding to speak to me whilst I was still on the phone to the real Johannes", the director wrote in an e-mail.
The money was funnelled through accounts in Hungary and Mexico before being scattered elsewhere, Euler Hermes representatives said. No suspects have been named, the insurer said, and the money has disappeared.
WASHINGTON POST
