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Alleged Deepfake CFO Scam Reportedly Costs Multinational Engineering Firm Arup $25 Million

30 news reports Snapshot 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Deepfake Technology Developers and Synthetic Audio Generation Technology Developers and deployed by Scammers allegedly harmed Unnamed Finance Employee and Arup.

Risk domain
Malicious Actors & Misuse Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
Occurred
Coverage
30 reportsFeb 2024 - May 2025

What happened

A finance employee at the multinational engineering firm Arup was reportedly deceived into transferring $25 million by fraudsters using purported deepfake technology to impersonate the firm's CFO in a video call, according to the Hong Kong police.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Malicious Actors & Misuse (Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (26)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’
    cnn.com · Heather Chen, Kathleen Magramo
  2. Hong Kong firm loses over $25mn after employee’s video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’, others
    wionews.com · Nishtha Badgamia
  3. Deepfake Scam Video Cost Company $26 Million, Hong Kong Police Says
    voanews.com · Agence France-Presse
  4. Scammers used deepfake CFO on video call to trick company employee into sending them $25M
    siliconangle.com · Mike Wheatley
  5. Deepfake CFO tricks Hong Kong biz out of $25 million
    theregister.com · Laura Dobberstein
  6. Company worker in Hong Kong pays out £20m in deepfake video call scam
    theguardian.com · Dan Milmo
  7. Deepfaked video conference call makes employee send $25 million to scammers
    helpnetsecurity.com · Zeljka Zorz
  8. Deepfake video conference convinces employee to send $25M to scammers
    scmagazine.com · Laura French
  9. Deepfaked video conference call costs company $25M
    cybernews.com · Gintaras Radauskas
  10. A company lost $25 million after an employee was tricked by deepfakes of his coworkers on a video call: police
    businessinsider.com · Huileng Tan
  11. Deepfake video call scam cons company out of $25 million
    readwrite.com · Sam Shedden
  12. Deepfake scammer walks off with $25 million in first-of-its-kind AI heist
    arstechnica.com · Benj Edwards
  13. Video Call With Deepfakes Costs UK Firm $25m in Hong Kong
    asiafinancial.com · Vishakha Saxena
  14. Employee Duped by AI-Generated CFO in $25.6M Deepfake Scam
    hackread.com · Deeba Ahmed
  15. Scammers in Hong Kong Used Deepfakes To Steal $25.6M USD
    hypebeast.com · Sarah Kearns
  16. Company Loses Millions After Employee Duped By Video Call Deepfakes
    huffpost.com · Ryan Grenoble
  17. Scammers Use Deepfakes to Steal $25.6 Million From Company in Hong Kong
    themercury.com · Wibbitz
  18. Hong Kong Video Deepfake Scam Nets HK$200 Million, Fraud Involved Simulation of Multiple Video Conference Participants
    cpomagazine.com · Scott Ikeda
  19. Deepfake Scammers Steal $25 Million From Company: 5 Ways You Can Avoid Being Victim to Latest AI Nightmare
    jdsupra.com · Wendy Hughes, Kelly McCall, Marie Tedesco Scott
  20. British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25 million deepfake scam victim
    cnn.com · Kathleen Magramo
  21. Scammers siphon $25M from engineering firm Arup via AI deepfake ‘CFO’
    cfodive.com · Grace Noto
  22. Deepfake scams escalate, hitting 53% of businesses
    cfodive.com · Alexei Alexis
  23. Reality Defender dials in on voice deepfake fraud in banking
    biometricupdate.com · Joel R. McConvey
  24. Are successful deepfake scams more common than we realize?
    ibm.com · Jennifer Gregory
  25. AI is used in half of bank scams. Here’s what you need to watch out for
    fortune.com · Abigail Rueger
  26. Generative AI makes fraud fluent – from phishing lures to fake lovers
    theregister.com · Iain Thomson

Who was involved

Alleged deployer
Scammers
Alleged harmed party
Unnamed Finance Employee, Arup

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
AI
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
—
Sectors
—
Countries
—

Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 4.3.

  • Cheating/plagiarism

    "Cheating/plagiarism - Use of another person’s or group’s words or ideas without consent and/or acknowledgement."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • IP/copyright loss

    "IP/copyright loss - Misuse or abuse of an individual or organisation’s intellectual property, including copyright, trademarks, and patents."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Financial and business

    "Financial and Business - Use or misuse of a technology system in a manner that damages the financial interests of an individual or group, or which causes strategic, operational, legal or financial harm to a business or...

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Impersonation/identity theft

    "Impersonation/identity theft - Theft of an individual, group or organisation’s identity by a third-party in order to defraud, mock or otherwise harm them."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Dehumanisation/objectification

    "Dehumanisation/objectification - Use or misuse of a technology system to depict and/or treat people as not human, less than human, or as objects."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Defamation/libel/slander

    "Defamation/libel/slander - Use of a technology system to create, facilitate or amplify false perception(s) about an individual, group, or organisation."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Misinformation and Manipulation

    "Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs can be exploited to craft deceptive narratives with levels of persuasiveness similar to human-generated content (Pan et al., 2023b; Spitale et al., 2023), to fabri- cate fake n...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Cybersecurity

    "LLMs may exacerbate cybersecurity risks in various ways (Newman, 2024). Firstly, LLMs may significantly amplify the effectiveness of deceptive operations aimed at tricking people into disclosing sensitive information or...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Other incidents involving Scammers

Source record: incident #634 on the AI Incident Database · all 30 reports