Deepfake and synthetic-media attacks use AI-generated voice or video, sometimes in real time on a live call, to impersonate an executive, colleague, or job candidate convincingly enough to bypass the human instinct to verify identity by sight or sound. This is the fastest-growing family in this library, and includes the largest single-incident loss documented on this site.
An unidentified impersonator used an AI-cloned voice and a hacked personal-contacts list to pose as White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, texting and calling senators, governors and business leaders with requests including a pardon list and a cash transfer, triggering an FBI investigation.
DAA Singaporean businessman transferred at least S$4.9 million after WhatsApp and email lures citing the Strait of Hormuz crisis drew him into a deepfake AI-generated Zoom "government meeting" that appeared to feature PM Lawrence Wong and other senior officials.
DAA Bengaluru retiree lost Rs 6.88 lakh after an AI-generated deepfake Facebook video falsely showed Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman endorsing a fake SBI/Finance-Ministry-linked investment scheme, with WhatsApp callers from a UK number then upselling him into repeated transfers.
DAKnowBe4 unknowingly hired a North Korean operative for a software engineering role after he passed four video interviews using an AI-enhanced stock photo and a stolen US identity; malware began loading the moment his company laptop arrived, but EDR and the SOC detected and contained the device within about 25 minutes.
DAAn attacker impersonated LastPass CEO Karim Toubba with an AI voice clone over WhatsApp, but the targeted employee spotted the red flags, ignored it, and reported it to security, so the attempt caused zero impact.
DAThe FBI's IC3 issued a December 2024 public advisory detailing how criminals use AI-generated text, images, voice cloning, and deepfake video to make fraud schemes, including loved-one crisis scams and bank-account impersonation, more scalable and believable.
DATreasury/OFAC sanctioned North Korean Ministry of National Defense and Munitions Industry Department front companies in Laos, China, and Vietnam for running fake-persona schemes that placed DPRK IT workers in remote jobs at hundreds of companies worldwide, generating hundreds of millions of dollars for weapons programs, in a scheme whose U.S.-facilitation side (Christina Chapman's laptop farm) generated over $17 million and led to a 102-month prison sentence.
DATwo New Jersey men ran US "laptop farms" and shell companies that let North Korean IT workers pose as American remote employees at 100+ US firms, generating over $5 million for the DPRK regime and enabling theft of ITAR-controlled defense data before both were sentenced to federal prison in April 2026.
DAA Brighton-area kitchen fitter lost roughly £76,000, including four loans he was pressured into taking out, after a Facebook ad using deepfaked video of Martin Lewis and Elon Musk lured him into a fake bitcoin investment run through a fraudulent Revolut account.
DAToronto podcast-analytics company CoHost spent two months and seven interview rounds with a candidate later revealed as an AI-fabricated persona whose "references" used voice/video filters mimicking his mannerisms on camera, with every digital trace vanishing within 30 minutes of rejection.
DABinance CCO Patrick Hillmann claimed scammers built an AI deepfake "hologram" of him from his TV interview footage and used it in live Zoom calls to convince crypto project teams they'd had real Binance token-listing meetings, a claim corroborated only by Hillmann's own account and unnamed secondhand reports, with no independent technical verification or publicly released video/audio evidence of the alleged deepfake.
DAA finance employee in Arup's Hong Kong office wired HK$200M (~US$25.6M) after a video conference in which the CFO and colleagues were all AI-generated deepfakes.
DAAn interstate Indian gang used AI-generated "eye-blink" deepfake videos made from stolen social-media photos to fool Aadhaar's facial-liveness e-KYC checks, hijack victims' Aadhaar-linked mobile numbers, and take out fraudulent instant loans at multiple banks and fintech lenders before Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Police arrested seven suspects.
DAHours before Maharashtra's 2024 assembly election polling, BJP-amplified audio clips purporting to catch opposition leaders Supriya Sule and Nana Patole discussing a bitcoin-funded election bribery scheme were independently forensically confirmed as substantially AI-generated voice clones.
Social Engineering Examples