Deepfake technology has become very sophisticated over the years, letting people resurrect the voices of the people that are no longer around us. However, some folks are using this tech to fulfill their nefarious intentions.

Something similar happened in a UAE bank that got fooled by criminals using AI voice to clone the owner’s voice and steam $35 million. Court documents recently found by Forbes revealed that fraudsters used a deepfaked voice of a company executive to fool a bank manager to transfer the millions to their possession in early 2020.

Using deepfake for robbery

The executive said his firm was to make an acquisition and much needed the money to do so. The bank manager recognized the voice of the executive from having worked with him before. So, believing everything was normal, he authorized the transaction – directly into the accounts of the criminals.

The UAE has urged aid from American investigators to trace around $400,000 that went into US-based bank accounts, as per the documents. Dubai investigators believe the heist was done by 17 people with the help of “deep voice” tech and sent money to banks across the globe.

This is the second instance where hackers used deepfake voice to try and rob a bank. In 2019, criminals used AI to impersonate an executive’s voice to steam $243,000, as per a report by The Wall Street Journal.

More intelligent AI systems incoming

Previously, Nvidia’s showcased its new voice AI, which is something far more realistic and levels above anything we’ve seen till now. Merging AI and a human reference recording, the fake voice sounds almost identical to a human’s.  

The company’s in-house creative team calls the process of achieving accurate voice synthesis. The team equates speech to music that has complex rhythms, pitches, and timbres that aren’t easy to replicate. Nvidia is creating tools that are capable of producing these intricacies with AI.