0
0
The Federal Criminal Police Office warns of a new scam in which criminals use deepfake technology to impersonate Interior Minister Karner to make money demands.
Deepfake scam: Criminals impersonate Interior Minister Karner; BKA warns of current fake calls and money demands.
A deceptively real-looking video chat with the alleged interior minister: With this perfidious scam, unknown individuals wanted to swindle money for supposed ransom payments.
The initial contact was made via the official telephone number of the Ministry of the Interior (+43 1 53126), which was manipulated using so-called “caller ID spoofing.” Subsequently, the minister’s identity was impersonated in a video chat, and financial resources were requested, allegedly for payments in connection with hostage-taking.
The Federal Criminal Police Office makes it clear: this is clearly an attempt at fraud. Neither the Ministry of the Interior nor any other Austrian authority would ever ask for donations for ransom payments by telephone or video chat.
Even though deepfakes appear deceptively real, they leave traces. Experts from the Cybercrime Competence Center (C4) at the Federal Criminal Police Office are already working closely with international partner services to track down those behind the scam and prevent further incidents.
Manipulation of images and videos is nothing new—face-swapping apps and social media challenges have made this technique widely known to the general public. However, the use of artificial intelligence has led to massive advances in this technology in recent years. Deepfakes are becoming increasingly easy to create and more difficult to recognise as such, and are being misused for criminal purposes.
In order to better record and evaluate deepfake crimes, the term “deepfake” was introduced into the police logging system on January 1, 2024. Since then, reports of deepfake manipulation can be evaluated separately to create a comprehensive picture of the situation and conduct targeted investigations.
- source: heute.at/picture: pixabay.com
This post has already been read 12 times!
