WHO CAN STOP THE DEEPFAKES?

As Al gets more realistic, scammers are making millions. But entrepreneurs are seeing opportunity too—by stopping the bad guys. If they can.

- by LIZ BRODY

Your CFO is on the video call asking you to transfer $25 million. He gives you all the bank info. Pretty routine. You got it. But, What the-? It wasn't the CFO? How can that be? You saw him with your own eyes and heard that undeniable voice you always half-listen for. Even the other colleagues on the screen weren't really them. And yes, you already made the transaction.

Ring a bell? That’s because it actually happened to an employee at the global engineering firm Arup last year, which lost $25 million to criminals. In other incidents, folks were scammed when “Elon Musk” and “Goldman Sachs executives” took to social media enthusing about great investment opportunities. And an agency leader at WPP, the largest advertising company in the world at the time, was almost tricked into giving money during a Teams meeting with a deepfake they thought was the CEO Mark Read.

Experts have been warning for years about deepfake AI technology evolving to a dangerous point, and now it’s happening. Used maliciously, these clones are infesting the culture from Hollywood to the White House. And although most businesses keep mum about deepfake attacks to prevent client concern, insiders say they’re occurring with increasing alarm. Deloitte predicts fraud losses from such incidents to hit $40 billion in the United States by 2027.

Obviously, we have a problem—and entrepreneurs love nothing more than finding something to solve. But this is no ordinary problem. You can’t sit and study it, because it moves as fast as you can, or even faster, always showing up in a new configuration in unexpected places.

The U.S. government has started to pass regulations on deepfakes, and the Al community is developing its own guardrails, including digital signatures and watermarks to identify their content. But scammers are not exactly known to stop at such roadblocks.