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"Deepfakes voices!" makes a cool headline but there's a 90% chance either the employee or the CEO is in on it. Right now the only real fact is "the employee cla

"Deepfakes voices!" makes a cool headline but there's a 90% chance either the employee or the CEO is in on it. Right now the only real fact is "the employee claims someone who sounded like the CEO called"... it's far more probable that either the employee is lying or the CEO actually made the call.

p1esk 7y ago
Not sure what makes you skeptical. The technology to do this sort of scam was ready at least a year ago. If anything I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner (it probably did, we just haven’t heard about it). If making money transfers is part of your job and your boss calls you to make an urgent transfer for a reasonable amount, why wouldn’t you do it?
- parliament32 7y ago
  Because the simplest explanation is often the right one. Do you think it's more likely that some scamming group somehow got thousands of hours of the CEO's voice, trained a world-class voice model, got internal info about how the CEO usually calls and requests transfers, found the correct employee to target, spoofed the incoming number... or was the employee's drinking buddy like "hey, just transfer X to this offshore account and say the CEO called you, we can pin it on that deepfakes stuff we saw in the news"? Or even more likely, CEO wants to embezzle some money so he makes a call for the transfer then feigns ignorance? If there was any sort of proof that this happened, like a recording, then sure. But there's no facts in the article other than "analysts suspect..." and an attention-grabbing headline. Maybe I'm just jaded but after everything that's happened over the last few years, but I take everything the media publishes with a grain of salt these days.
  - p1esk 7y ago
    My understanding is you don’t need 1000s of hours of CEO’s voice. You train the model on many voices, then fine tune it on a few hours of the target voice. Regardless of what happened in this particular case, this type of scam is now possible, feasible, and will get easier to perform with time. We should be concerned.

p1esk 7y ago

Not sure what makes you skeptical. The technology to do this sort of scam was ready at least a year ago. If anything I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner (it probably did, we just haven’t heard about it). If making money transfers is part of your job and your boss calls you to make an urgent transfer for a reasonable amount, why wouldn’t you do it?

parliament32 7y ago
Because the simplest explanation is often the right one. Do you think it's more likely that some scamming group somehow got thousands of hours of the CEO's voice, trained a world-class voice model, got internal info about how the CEO usually calls and requests transfers, found the correct employee to target, spoofed the incoming number... or was the employee's drinking buddy like "hey, just transfer X to this offshore account and say the CEO called you, we can pin it on that deepfakes stuff we saw in the news"? Or even more likely, CEO wants to embezzle some money so he makes a call for the transfer then feigns ignorance? If there was any sort of proof that this happened, like a recording, then sure. But there's no facts in the article other than "analysts suspect..." and an attention-grabbing headline. Maybe I'm just jaded but after everything that's happened over the last few years, but I take everything the media publishes with a grain of salt these days.
- p1esk 7y ago
  My understanding is you don’t need 1000s of hours of CEO’s voice. You train the model on many voices, then fine tune it on a few hours of the target voice. Regardless of what happened in this particular case, this type of scam is now possible, feasible, and will get easier to perform with time. We should be concerned.