Augmented CEO Fraud

The 2019 edition of the Future of Money Award (FoMA) challenged creators to design the financial crime of the future (a fictional one, of course). Participants were invited to imagine a scam or a fraud that exploits emerging legal loopholes, shifts in social norms, or advanced technologies.

Augmented CEO Fraud envisions an sophisticated scam driven by artificial intelligence, designed to identify extortion opportunities and impersonate senior executives. The goal? To deceive employees by posing as their superior, coercing them into unauthorised financial or data transfers.
This speculative crime reinterprets the CEO Fraud (or Business Email Compromise) scam — a scheme that, according to the FBI, resulted in nearly $12 billion in losses in 2018.

Set in 2022, the Augmented CEO Fraud fiction explores how deepfake technology could be leveraged to manipulate employees within a company or public institution, combining psychological deception with digital subterfuge.

In this probable future, cybercriminals harness artificial intelligence to refine executive identity theft, crafting high-stakes requests directed at employees. As awareness of traditional phishing attempts increases, this new technological tactic specifically targets the weakest links within organisations.

This speculative crime automates fraud in two key stages, leveraging a combination of artificial intelligence tools that:

• Aggregate and analyse information, particularly data gathered from social media, to identify vulnerabilities, opportunities for identity theft, and priority targets within organisations.
• Generate deepfakes, replicating the face and/or voice of a CEO or lawyer, to pressure unsuspecting employees into transferring funds or sensitive data.

Due to its automated scalability, the Augmented CEO Fraud scam has wide-ranging impacts on the public and private organisations it targets:

• Significant financial losses, potentially amounting to hundreds of thousands or even millions of euros.
• Data breaches, as criminals seek not only financial gains but also strategic information.
• Destabilisation of the organisation, damaging its reputation and eroding trust among clients, furnishers, employees and partners.

Our design fiction scenario, won first prize at the Future Money Awards and was showcased at the partner conference Money20/20 in Amsterdam. Since we first envisaged it, deepfake-driven impersonation to extort money or information has emerged as a genuine threat. While still operating at a lower level of automation than described in our fiction, it is becoming an increasingly tangible risk.