Live data from Hacker News

British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim

cnn.com

21–30 of 109 posts

Re: British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim

#21

> According to police, the worker had initially suspected he had received a phishing email from the company’s UK office, as it specified the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized. Regardless of the sophistication of the deepfake, surely this rings huge a…

The scammers usually have a slightly unusual, but plausible (and urgent) story.

For example, that they've just closed a deal to buy a startup - a negotiation which was of course conducted in secrecy. It's a startup in another country, which is why we're all out of the office. Timezones are why you've received the request outside of normal working hours. And we've got to, um, close the deal so we can announce it outside of stock market opening hours, for both countries. To close the deal we've got to pay 10% of the 250M purchase price upfront. If you can't get this done within 2 hours the deal will fall through.

Re: British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim

#22
post #2

I said this over a year ago elsewhere: Electronic engineers spent decades overcoming thermal noise floors so that humans could communicate over vast distances with small amounts of energy. AI researchers, in a few short years, undid all that by making computer-generated chatter and images indistinguishable from messages sent by humans. Until such a time as we live in a Bladerunner-like world of Replicants, being in-p…

we're probably ~10 years away from replicants. in 20years there's going to be millions of tesla humanoid robots all over the place

[flagged]

Re: British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim

#23
post #2

I said this over a year ago elsewhere: Electronic engineers spent decades overcoming thermal noise floors so that humans could communicate over vast distances with small amounts of energy. AI researchers, in a few short years, undid all that by making computer-generated chatter and images indistinguishable from messages sent by humans. Until such a time as we live in a Bladerunner-like world of Replicants, being in-p…

Isn't it also possible to scam people in in person meetings by pretending to be someone you aren't? The new thing with deepfakes is that you can pretend to be someone that the victim knows.

Scaling up in-person fraud is also much, much harder.

Re: British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim

#24
post #2

I said this over a year ago elsewhere: Electronic engineers spent decades overcoming thermal noise floors so that humans could communicate over vast distances with small amounts of energy. AI researchers, in a few short years, undid all that by making computer-generated chatter and images indistinguishable from messages sent by humans. Until such a time as we live in a Bladerunner-like world of Replicants, being in-p…

we're probably ~10 years away from replicants. in 20years there's going to be millions of tesla humanoid robots all over the place

We’ve had millions of robotaxis since 2017

Re: British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim

#26
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need new ident protocol just for AI. I think that's part of Altman doing that orb thingy with iris scanner. It's creepy though and I'll never touch that things.

What's wrong with good ol' private keys?

Same as with public transport. You can’t have because it’s haram for some political position

Re: British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim

#27
How cool is it that Zoom is capturing our data and using it to train their "AI" efforts? Perhaps nobody in the world is better positioned to completely disrupt nearly every tech-using company, by emulating our C-suites, and ordering us to drain everything. Imagine the Robin Hood shenanigans they could get up to! Or the evil supervillain shenanigans! Who cares, really. The future is so fun!

Re: British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim

#28

> According to police, the worker had initially suspected he had received a phishing email from the company’s UK office, as it specified the need for a secret transaction to be carried out. However, the worker put aside his doubts after the video call because other people in attendance had looked and sounded just like colleagues he recognized. Regardless of the sophistication of the deepfake, surely this rings huge a…

Yeah, this would at least cause me to email my boss and say "Can you just confirm, you want me to transfer $25 million to this account? I'll hold off until you give me confirmation in writing"

hell i do this if our tester hasn't managed to go over some aspect of our release. That way i get in writing from the product owner that he has OKd it, and if he sends me a teams message i ask him to email me confirmation.

Re: British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25M deepfake scam victim

#30

What I find strange about this is you dont need it to be "deepfake". Just an inside job. If a large company allows a single employee to transfer millions to a new bank account/vendor that has no history, on "their belief" the instruction came from an approved person (i.e. their boss, CFO etc) - that company has major governance issues that are not related to deepfake. Imagine the more simple scenario - an employee tr…

It reminds me of this case of a hypnotised bank teller http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7309947.stm
Post reply on HN