Speaker 1: Approache Production. It's January twenty twenty four in the office
Speaker 1: of a ROP. Lee Chan not his real name, is
Speaker 1: working in his Level five office in downtown Hong Kong.
Speaker 1: He works in finance. At about two pm, Lee gets
Speaker 1: an email from the London head office. It doesn't seem legit.
Speaker 1: He thinks it might be a phishing scam, but over
Speaker 1: the next few days he transfers over forty million Australian
Speaker 1: dollars to an unknown person or person's welcome to deep
Speaker 1: fake the forty million dollar fraud.
Speaker 2: The worker ended up getting persuaded that like no, I'm
Speaker 2: talking to a real person. This is legit, right, and
Speaker 2: so let's move forward with this deal.
Speaker 1: I'm Amelia Thompson. I've spent the last twelve years digging
Speaker 1: into the murky depths of financial crime here in Australia.
Speaker 1: I'm covering everything from corporate five fraud to money laundering
Speaker 1: schemes that reach the highest levels of power. My name
Speaker 1: is Dander and McCullough.
Speaker 3: I have a PhD in cryptology, which is the mathematics
Speaker 3: of code.
Speaker 2: The worker initially received an email from what claimed to
Speaker 2: be a UK based company's chief financial officer.
Speaker 1: The CFO high Lee, Thanks for coming on the call
Speaker 1: so quickly. This is critical business and a transaction that
Speaker 1: needs the utmost confidentiality. I'm here to share one of
Speaker 1: the fastest growing areas of crime, deep fakes, and how
Speaker 1: by twenty twenty seven, they will account for over forty
Speaker 1: billion dollars of scams in the US alone.
Speaker 4: You expect like people are just starting to understand what
Speaker 4: a deep fake is, and they probably think, as I
Speaker 4: thought prior to this story, that it's the sort of
Speaker 4: thing where you have to take actual video and then
Speaker 4: you take video faces, you train a model. It's complex,
Speaker 4: and that eventually.
Speaker 3: There They're becoming more and more frequent, more and more frequently.
Speaker 5: It's very, very hard to identify a deep fate.
Speaker 2: I am not Mormon freeman.
Speaker 4: This is a dangerous time.
Speaker 1: Deep fakes, deep fakes, deep fixts, deep fixed.
Speaker 4: Videos that look so real it's hard to tell what.
Speaker 1: Speak from online pop stars.
Speaker 5: So I'm not the only robot pop star. I was
Speaker 5: programmed to believe that I was an eighteen year old
Speaker 5: have Brazilian half Spanish girl names with a.
Speaker 1: Deep fake porn.
Speaker 2: It's really heartbreaking that this is happening. And even though
Speaker 2: it's a I generated, it's still very real, and it's
Speaker 2: still really harms.
Speaker 1: Pick and scams where millions are being lost by the minute.
Speaker 3: I was not surprised at all. We've been talking in
Speaker 3: the industry about this is going to be the next
Speaker 3: big thing and it was just a matter of time.
Speaker 3: So as soon as it happened, I said to my colleagues,
Speaker 3: here we go. Here's the first one, and of course
Speaker 3: you're going to see a lot more to come.
Speaker 5: But it's created online and shared in the shadows.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 5: I'm still trying to wrap my head around this case
Speaker 5: that has emerged in Hong Kong and which is making
Speaker 5: global headlines because, like I keep saying, this is chilling.
Speaker 5: This sounds like the plot of the fines fiction movie,
Speaker 5: except that it's.
Speaker 1: Not deep fake. The forty million Dollar Fraud. Subscribe now
Speaker 1: to Apple podcast Subscriptions to get episodes ad free and early.
Speaker 1: The first episode drops Monday, September sixteenth.
Speaker 3: The use of AI voices has been used in this
Speaker 3: podcast to help recreate some moments