Deepfake video conference sees criminals escape with US$25 million


In February, a multinational company’s finance team member in Hong Kong made headlines after he transmitted HK$200 million (US$25 million) to cybercriminals who pretended to be the chief financial officer and other colleagues, using deepfake technology, in what the worker thought was a legitimate video conference.

Now it’s been revealed that it was UK engineering group Arup that fell victim to the elaborate scam. When the cybercrime was first brought to light earlier this year, Hong Kong police’s Baron Chan Shun-ching told local reporters: “(In the) multi-person video conference, it turns out that everyone [he saw] was fake.”

Read more…
Source: Insurance Business


Sign up for our Newsletter


Related:

  • Supermarket chain Lidl warns customers after data leak

    July 10, 2026

    Unknown individuals managed to gain access to customer data held by the supermarket chain Lidl. The German company informed affected customers of this via email this week. Thus far, the supermarket chain has declined to say how many customers were affected. However, the discount retailer did state that it has notified the Dutch Data Protection Authority. Read ...

  • No Manners Here: The Ruthless Rise of The Gentlemen Ransomware

    July 10, 2026

    The Gentlemen (aka Storm-2697) is a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) program active since at least July 2025. Public reporting indicates that the operators were likely active months earlier as an affiliate (known as ArmCorp) of Qilin RaaS, which Unit 42 tracks as Spikey Scorpius. Their ransomware variants are written in both C and Go programming languages, enabling ...

  • Florida ransomware negotiator convicted for helping ransomware gang extort US companies

    July 10, 2026

    Florida man Angelo Martino has been sentenced to more than five years in prison for conspiring with hackers to deploy ransomware during his job as a ransomware negotiator for a U.S. cybersecurity company. The U.S. Department of Justice confirmed the sentence on Thursday, noting that the government seized more than $10 million worth of cryptocurrency and assets. Martino ...

  • Accenture confirms breach after hacker steals 35GB of source code and other data

    July 9, 2026

    Accenture has confirmed suffering a cyberattack, days after threat actors started selling an archive allegedly coming from the firm. “We are aware of this isolated matter, and we have remediated its source. There is no impact to Accenture operations and service delivery,” Accenture said in a statement. It follows a relatively unknown threat actor called 888 posting ...

  • An unnamed US county paid $1M extortion demand to cybercriminals

    July 9, 2026

    A US county reportedly paid $1 million to Kairos, an extortion gang that claimed to have stolen more than 2 TB of data, but the county never received independently verifiable proof that the stolen files had been deleted – just the criminals’ promise. This means the county’s stolen files may turn up for sale on a ...

  • GigaWiper: Anatomy of a destructive backdoor assembled from multiple malware

    July 9, 2026

    In October 2025, Microsoft Threat Intelligence identified destructive wiping activity and uncovered a sophisticated Go programming language (Golang)-based backdoor we now track as GigaWiper, a versatile implant that combines robust command-and-control (C2) capabilities with multiple destructive payloads, including disk wiping, fake ransomware, and system-level sabotage. GigaWiper is particularly notable for its makeup. It’s not a single, ...