A finance employee at a multinational firm joined what appeared to be a routine video call. The CFO was on screen. So were several colleagues. The meeting looked real, sounded real and felt real. It wasn’t. Every face had been generated by artificial intelligence. The employee transferred $25.6 million before anyone at the firm knew what had happened.
CNN reported that the worker believed his colleagues on the call were real. Hong Kong police determined all of them were deepfake re-creations. Fortune confirmed the victim was Arup, the London-based engineering firm behind the Sydney Opera House. “Fake voices and images were used,” a spokesperson told the outlet.
From Phishing Emails to Synthetic Meetings
What made the Arup attack different from earlier fraud wasn’t the technology in isolation. It was the combination. Attackers didn’t rely on a single fake email or a cloned voice call. They built an entire fabricated environment, synthetic video, cloned audio and real company context, and ran it in real time across a live meeting platform.
Multimodal campaigns combine email, voice and video sequentially to build cumulative credibility across multiple communication channels simultaneously. The employee had initially suspected a phishing attempt. The video call eliminated that suspicion. Hong Kong police determined that attackers built deepfakes of the CFO and colleagues using existing video and audio from online conferences and virtual company meetings.
Publicly available footage of executives, earnings calls, conference presentations and LinkedIn videos, is now training data for fraudsters. The World Economic Forum noted that voice cloning now requires just 20 to 30 seconds of audio, while convincing video deepfakes can be created in 45 minutes using freely available software. Fraudsters attempted to impersonate Ferrari CEO Benedetto Vigna through AI-cloned voice calls that replicated his southern Italian accent, the WEF reported. That call ended only when an executive asked a question only Vigna would know.
The Scale Is No Longer Theoretical
Deepfake-enabled vishing attacks surged 1,600% in the first quarter of 2025 compared to the fourth quarter of 2024 in the U.S. alone, CybelAngel reported, citing Keepnet Labs data. The FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report logged more than 22,000 AI-related fraud complaints with losses exceeding $893 million. Congressional researchers estimate fewer than 5% of voice clone victims report their losses.
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PYMNTS Intelligence found that 58% of companies with more than $1 billion in annual revenue reported encountering AI-generated documents or deepfake-related attacks in the past year, a full 11 percentage points above smaller firms.
The Defense Problem
The Arup employee did everything a cautious person might reasonably do. He suspected the initial email. He sought visual confirmation on a video call. He looked to colleagues for a second opinion. Every verification step had been anticipated and neutralized.
The fraud was only discovered when the employee followed up with Arup’s actual headquarters, Hong Kong police found. Executives confirmed they had authorized no such transaction and had no knowledge of any video conference.
Arup’s Chief Information Officer Rob Greig told Fortune that attempts to defraud companies have risen sharply using phishing scams and WhatsApp voice cloning.
Wire transfer authorization processes built around visual confirmation and senior executive approval no longer hold against attacks that can simulate both. The FBI’s 2025 report put the number of AI fraud complaints at more than 22,000. Actual losses are higher.
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