A single call cost $108 million How does artificial intelligence deceive banks?

Last February, about $108 million was stolen from Fideuram, the private banking arm of Italy ’s Intesa Sanpaolo bank , through a fraud scheme reminiscent of those seen in adventure movies, a scam that fooled the head of Fideuram and the CEO of Italy’s largest bank.

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The scheme began when Paolo Molesini, who was the president of Videoram, received a message via WhatsApp from Carlo Messina, the CEO of Intesa Sanpaolo bank.

In the letter, Messina asked Molesini for urgent assistance regarding a pending foreign transaction. He then received a seemingly genuine phone call from a senior partner at a prestigious law firm to confirm instructions he had received from his boss.

Molesini then directed his finance department to arrange a series of financial transfers to foreign accounts, mostly in China and Hong Kong, only to discover later that he had been the victim of a fraud scheme that forged and replicated the lawyer's voice using artificial intelligence.

This incident highlights one of the biggest crises caused by artificial intelligence around the world: enhancing the fraudulent capabilities of hackers and fraud teams to the point of deceiving the heads of major financial companies and global banks.

Due to the development of artificial intelligence technologies, traditional mechanisms used to verify user identity and combat fraud have become ineffective, according to Jonathan Frost, Global Consulting Director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa at BioCatch, an American company working in the prevention of digital fraud.

Frost adds that AI-enhanced fraud “gives all traditional controls a green light, while behavioral intelligence looks at the person rather than the transaction.”

Behavioral intelligence allows tracking a person's typical behavior, and when any strange or different activity is detected, the process can be stopped until the person's identity is verified through intensive procedures.