A scammer in China used artificial intelligence (AI) to pose as a businessman’s trusted friend and convince him to hand over millions of yuan, authorities have said.
The victim, surnamed Guo, received a video call last month from a person who looked and sounded like a close friend. However, the caller was actually a con artist “using smart AI technology to change their face” and voice, said an article published on Monday by a media portal associated with the government in Fuzhou City.
The scammer was “masquerading as [Guo’s] good friend and perpetrating fraud,” the article said.
File photo: AFP
Guo was persuaded to transfer 4.3 million yuan (US$610,000) after the fraudster claimed another friend needed the money to come from a company bank account to pay the guarantee on a public tender.
The con artist asked for Guo’s personal bank account number and then claimed an equivalent sum had been wired to that account, sending him a screenshot of a fraudulent payment record. Without checking that he had received the money, Guo sent two payments from his company account totaling the amount requested.
“At the time, I verified the face and voice of the person video-calling me, so I let down my guard,” the article quoted Guo as saying.
He only realized his mistake after messaging the friend whose identity had been stolen, who had no knowledge of the transaction.
Guo alerted police, who notified a bank in another city not to proceed with the transfers, and he managed to recover 3.4 million yuan, the article said.
Efforts to claw back the remaining funds were ongoing, the article said, but it did not identify the perpetrators of the scheme.
The potential pitfalls of groundbreaking AI technology have received heightened attention since US-based OpenAI in November last year launched ChatGPT, a chatbot that mimics human speech.
China has announced ambitious plans to become a global AI leader by 2030, and a slew of tech firms, including Alibaba, JD.com, NetEase and TikTok parent ByteDance, have rushed to develop similar products.
ChatGPT is unavailable in China, but the US software is acquiring a base of Chinese users who use virtual private networks to gain access to it for writing essays and cramming for exams. However, it is also being used for more nefarious purposes.
This month, police in Gansu Province said that “coercive measures” had been taken against a man who used ChatGPT to create a fake news article about a deadly bus crash that was spread widely on social media.
A law regulating deepfakes, which came into effect in January, bans the use of the technology to produce, publish or transmit false news.
In addition, a draft law proposed last month by Beijing’s Internet regulator would require all new AI products to undergo a “security assessment” before being released to the public.
Le Tuan Binh keeps his Moroccan soldier father’s tombstone at his village home north of Hanoi, a treasured reminder of a man whose community in Vietnam has been largely forgotten. Mzid Ben Ali, or “Mohammed” as Binh calls him, was one of tens of thousands of North Africans who served in the French army as it battled to maintain its colonial rule of Indochina. He fought for France against the Viet Minh independence movement in the 1950s, before leaving the military — as either a defector or a captive — and making a life for himself in Vietnam. “It’s very emotional for me,”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Committee is to gather in July for a key meeting known as a plenum, the third since the body of elite decisionmakers was elected in 2022, focusing on reforms amid “challenges” at home and complexities broad. Plenums are important events on China’s political calendar that require the attendance of all of the Central Committee, comprising 205 members and 171 alternate members with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at the helm. The Central Committee typically holds seven plenums between party congresses, which are held once every five years. The current central committee members were elected at the
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi reaffirmed his pledge to replace India’s religion-based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code if he returns to office for a third term, a move that some minority groups have opposed. In an interview with the Times of India listing his agenda, Modi said his government would push for making the code a reality. “It is clear that separate laws for communities are detrimental to the health of society,” he said in the interview published yesterday. “We cannot be a nation where one community is progressing with the support of the Constitution while the other
CODIFYING DISCRIMINATION: Transgender people would be sentenced to three years in prison, while same-sex relations could land a person in jail for more than a decade Iraq’s parliament on Saturday passed a bill criminalizing same-sex relations, which would receive a sentence of up to 15 years in prison, in a move rights groups condemned as an “attack on human rights.” Transgender people would be sentenced to three years’ jail under the amendments to a 1988 anti-prostitution law, which were adopted during a session attended by 170 of 329 lawmakers. A previous draft had proposed capital punishment for same-sex relations, in what campaigners had called a “dangerous” escalation. The new amendments enable courts to sentence people engaging in same-sex relations to 10 to 15 years in prison, according to the