Vimal lost his girlfriend and emptied his wallet. ‘Deepfake’ did it all.

Vimal is a small-time businessman in Ayodhya. A few days back he received a call from unknown number. It was Priyanka, his girlfriend. She was sounding panicky. She had met an accident and lost her mobile phone. She was in hospital calling from borrowed mobile.

Priyanka asked for financial help. Vimal responded with a quick transfer of Rs. 45000 on her desired wallet. In a hurry, he forgot to ask the name of the hospital she was admitted into. After almost five hours, he called up the unknown number. It was switched off. He called Priyanka at her number. She picked up the phone and denied any such accident. When Vimal told her the entire incident, she became angrier. She accused him of cheating and broke up.

Vimal was a victim of ‘deepfake’ technology. This is AI based technology used to copy voice, looks and gesture of somebody. It’s embedded with facial recognition algorithms, voice simulation, artificial neural networks like variational auto encoders and generative adversarial networks. Breaking the barriers of photo-recognition mechanism is a child’s play for deepfake technology. Deepfake technology with spoofing mechanism is a lethal cocktail.

In a recent incident, the clerk of Hong Kong Branch of a multinational company was tricked into making payment of 200 million Hongkong dollar by joining an audio conference call where the other participants were deepfakes of his colleagues. This case has been widely publicized by international banks to safeguard its clients.

To safeguard against ‘deepfake’, one should avoid using mobile number in UPI and keep changing UPI PIN. Since voice, syntax and gesture can be emulated with AI, never pay much importance to distressed and panicky voice modulations.