TRUE OR FALSE. Artificial intelligence makes CEO scams even more credible.

This scam, which has existed for about fifteen years, is amplified by AI.

This CEO scam is a well-established method. It involves contacting, often by email, one of a company's accountants, impersonating the boss, who requests an urgent bank transfer. The employee, under pressure, complies and sends a large sum of money, unaware that it's going to an overseas account.

This CEO scam, which has been running for over fifteen years, is now well known to the police. In France, there were over 600 cases of this type in 2023, with almost €50 million embezzled . This represents an average loss of €75,000.

Until now, these scams were often carried out via email, but now, with artificial intelligence, it's even more credible to use a phone call. It's become very easy to clone a person's voice. All you need is an audio recording. The victimized employee can then easily believe they're really talking to their boss.

There have already been a few recent cases. For example, in Italy , at the beginning of the year, the voice of the Minister of Defense was cloned. Several industrialists were contacted by this fake minister to ask them for money. One of them fell for it and made a transfer of one million euros.

With AI, this CEO scam goes even further; it can even be carried out via video. This happened to an employee of a company in Hong Kong. He was invited to a video conference where, unknowingly, he was the only human participant. The CFO and other company officials were actually deepfakes, doctored images. But the employee believed it and wired over €20 million.

Completely protecting yourself from CEO scams is difficult, especially with a cloned voice, which is almost impossible to detect by ear. However, the Ministry of Economy still makes several recommendations for businesses. First, by raising employee awareness of this threat.

They are often the ones who can foil CEO scams by, for example, asking a very specific or personal question, to which artificial intelligence will not be able to invent an answer. Or by contacting the person who just called, to make sure that it was really them on the other end of the line.