Southeast Asia’s scammers’ new disguise: your leader’s face

Scammers in Southeast Asia are using generative AI to clone the faces and voices of trusted leaders, including Singapore's Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, to defraud victims. In one case, a deepfake of Wong on a Zoom call helped steal US$3.8 million from a victim who believed he was meeting with officials. The fraud exploits human trust rather than technical vulnerabilities.

Southeast Asia’s scammers’ new disguise: your leader’s face The president is asking for your bank details. He isn’t, of course. But the AI wearing his face is Singapore https://www.scmp.com/topics/singapore?module=inline&pgtype=article ’s prime minister that exists only to steal money. It connected to a Zoom call, thanked a stranger for his time and helped relieve him of US$3.8 million https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/southeast-asia/article/3353868/how-victim-lost-us38-million-singapore-deepfake-zoom-scam-impersonating-pm-wong?module=inline&pgtype=article – with the real Lawrence Wong https://www.scmp.com/topics/lawrence-wong?module=inline&pgtype=article , for a time, none the wiser about what had happened. The victim had received a WhatsApp message purporting to be from the secretary to the cabinet, inviting him to a private meeting. Tharman Shanmugaratnam https://www.scmp.com/topics/tharman-shanmugaratnam?module=inline&pgtype=article , cabinet minister Indranee Rajah and foreign dignitaries, all rendered convincingly enough to believe they were discussing funding tied to the Strait of Hormuz. The synthetic Wong closed the meeting by thanking the victim for attending. Then a fake lawyer took the call and S$4.9 million US$3.8 million vanished into an account that no longer exists. Southeast Asia’s scam industry has found a powerful new weapon, and it isn’t malware, cunning or even greed – it’s borrowed faces. Criminals are increasingly cloning the region’s most trusted leaders using generative AI, wrapping fraud in the unimpeachable authority of a president’s voice or a prime minister’s visage and cashing in on the thing no security system can patch: human trust.