Criminal exploitation of deepfakes in South East Asia

In December 2023, videos of Lee Hsien Loong, prime minister of Singapore, and Lawrence Wong, the deputy prime minister, were circulated online to promote crypto and investment products. These images turned out to be deepfakes – AI-generated videos designed to fake their identities. In early 2022, Thai criminals were found to be using deepfakes to impersonate police officers in extortion video calls. And in February 2024, the Hong Kong office of a multinational company lost US$25.6 million to a deepfake video conference call impersonating its chief financial officer. These are just a few of the many cases in the Asia-Pacific region where AI-generated images and audio have been used for malicious purposes, including fake kidnappings, sexual abuse material and fraudulent schemes.The term ‘deepfake’, a combination of ‘deep learning’ and ‘fake’, refers to hyper-realistic videos created to resemble real people. Deepfakes use neural networks that analyze extensive data sets to replicate a per...