Scammers create ‘Deepfake’ of Binance exec, conduct online meeting

Aug 25, 2022

RawNews1st – Scammers create ‘Deepfake’ of Binance exec, conduct online meeting.

Scammers often impersonate companies or executives through fake emails and social media profiles. Now fraudsters have reportedly taken things to the next level by creating a “deepfake” of an executive at Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency platform.

Patrick Hillmann, the chief communications officer at Binance, claims that a “sophisticated hacking team” used video footage of his past TV appearances and digitally altered it to make an “AI hologram” of him and trick people into meetings.

In a company blog post**,** Hillman warned users to be vigilant following the incidents.

“Other than the 15 pounds that I gained during COVID being noticeably absent, this deep fake was refined enough to fool several highly intelligent crypto community members,” he wrote.

Although there has been much discussion of the potential of deepfakes to impersonate people in video calls, there have been no definitively confirmed cases to date.

Audio deepfakes have been used to impersonate people over the phone, and video deepfakes have been shared on social media to boost scams (a recent example used a deepfake of Elon Musk, a common target for impersonation in crypto scams).

But it’s not clear if the technology in its most accessible form is sophisticated enough yet to sustain an impersonation during a live call.

Indeed, experts recommend that the simplest way to tell if you’re talking to a deepfake is simply to ask the individual to turn their head, as machine learning models used to create the deepfake do not generally include a face’s profile.