In Hong Kong, a company was defrauded of $26 million using artificial intelligence.

A multinational company was defrauded of nearly $26 million in a scam based on “deepfake” technology, which creates videos using artificial intelligence, Hong Kong police said this Sunday.

This was one of the first cases in the city where attackers used technology to impersonate one of the company’s employees.

A “deepfake” is a video or audio recording created or altered using artificial intelligence. This method can generate misinformation: for example, you can make people say things they never actually said, or replace people’s faces, always so perfectly that the error is difficult to detect.

A company employee in a Chinese financial hub received a “video conference call from someone posing as a senior employee of his company and asking to transfer money to certain bank accounts,” police said, as quoted by AFP news agency.

Police received a report of the incident on January 29, when about $26 million (€24 million) had already been lost through 15 transfers.

“The investigation is still ongoing and no arrests have been made to date,” police said, without disclosing the name of the company.

According to Hong Kong media, the victim worked in the finance department, and the criminals posed as the financial director of a company based in the UK.

Senior police official Baron Chan said there were several participants in the video conference, but all but the victim were pretending to be other people.

“The criminals found publicly available videos and audios on YouTube and then used deepfake technology to imitate voices… to trick the victim into following their instructions,” Baron Chan told reporters.

The deepfake videos were pre-recorded and did not include any dialogue or interaction with the victim, he added.