She appeared to be a beautiful woman and in the minds of men across Asia, the video calls they spoke on confirmed their newfound love was real.
But Hong Kong police say the men had fallen prey to a romance scam that used deepfake artificial intelligence to lure its victims into parting with more than $46 million.
In a news conference Monday, police in the Asian financial hub announced the arrests of more than two dozen members of the alleged scam ring, which they say targeted men from Taiwan to Singapore and as far away as India.
Police said the 21 men and six women were held on charges including conspiracy to defraud following a raid on the gang’s alleged operating center at a 4,000-square-foot industrial unit in the city’s Hung Hom district.
Aged 21 to 34, the suspects were mostly well-educated, with many of them digital media and technology graduates allegedly recruited by the gang after attending local universities, police said. The suspects allegedly worked with IT specialists overseas to build a fake cryptocurrency platform, where the victims were coerced to make investments, police added.
Deepfakes are comprised of realistic fake video, audio and other content created with the help of AI. The technology is being increasingly adopted by a variety of bad actors, from people wishing to spread convincing disinformation to online scammers.
“Pig-butchering” scams – named for the “fattening up” of victims before taking everything they have – are a multibillion-dollar illicit industry in which the con artists take on false online identities and spend months grooming their targets to get them to invest on bogus crypto sites. Deepfakes are one more weapon in their arsenal to try and convince unsuspecting marks to part with money.
Typically run by Chinese gangs out of Southeast Asia, it is unclear how widespread the crime is in Hong Kong, a wealthy city where police have long campaigned to raise awareness of telephone scams following several high-profile cases in which the victims –often elderly people – reported staggeringly high losses.
But increasingly realistic deepfake technology has raised the stakes and put authorities on high alert.
Earlier this year, a British multinational design and engineering company in Hong Kong lost $25 million to fraudsters after an employee was duped by scammers using deepfake tech to pose as its chief financial officer and other staff.
According to Hong Kong police, the romance gang’s deepfake scam typically began with a text message, in which the sender – posing as an attractive woman – said they had mistakenly added the wrong number.
The alleged scammers then struck up online romances with their victims, fostering a sense of intimacy until they began planning a future together.
The group was highly organized, divided into departments responsible for different stages of the scam, police said. They even used a training manual to teach members how to carry out the con by taking advantage of “the victim’s sincerity and emotion,” said police, who posted parts of the manual on Facebook.
Among the steps: learning about the victim’s worldview to create a “tailor-made” persona; inventing difficulties such as failed relationships or businesses to “deepen the other person’s trust”; and finally, painting a “beautiful vision” including travel plans together to push the victim into investing.
The scam ran for about a year before police received intelligence about it around August, police said. More than 100 cell phones, the equivalent of nearly $26,000 in cash and a number of luxury watches were recovered in the raid, police said.