Good morning, it's finance editor Jeff Roberts tagging in for Sheryl. It's been a year since clever crooks tricked a staff member of a design firm into joining a video call with deep fake versions of the company's CFO and other executives—a call that was so convincing that the employee wired a series of payments totaling over $25 million. The incident, which sounds like something ripped out of a Black Mirror episode, likely kept more than a few finance chiefs up at night. And for good reason.
On a recent webinar, the CEO of fintech firm Plaid said fraud has soared to the top of the list of things that banks are focusing on this year. The reason for this, unsurprisingly, is AI, which has given bad actors a powerful set of tools to trick finance departments into approving fraudulent payments. Those tools include deepfake videos like the one described above, but also ones to create hyperrealistic replicas of corporate documents. It's also easy enough to imagine hackers getting inside a CFO's email in order to train generative AI models to mimic their communication styles.
