Faces that never existed#

Week 5 — deepfakes and synthetic video#

Case one: the Hong Kong video call#

• early 2024, an employee of Arup — the firm behind the Sydney Opera House — joins a video call with several “colleagues,” including the CFO
• instructed to transfer roughly USD 25 million across multiple transactions
• every participant except the employee was a synthetic reconstruction
• Arup confirmed the incident to CNN; no research-grade model was required

Case two: the crypto endorsement#

• a deepfake video impersonating a well-known entrepreneur
• used to promote a cryptocurrency scheme
• convinced an elderly retiree to invest his life savings
• the fake didn’t need to fool an expert — it only needed to fool one person, once

Synthesis vs reenactment#

• synthesis — building a face or voice largely from a model’s learned distribution
• reenactment — puppeting a real, consenting or non-consenting person’s likeness with someone else’s performance
• different techniques, different artefacts, different defences

What a post-hoc review can and can’t do#

• can: check compression artefacts, audio-visual sync, lighting consistency, metadata trails where they still exist
• can’t: fully undo what a lossy re-encode already destroyed, or prove a negative from absence of evidence alone

For discussion#

If both cases had happened to your organisation, what single process change — not tool, process — would have stopped the money moving?