Everyone else on the call was generated

In January 2024 a finance employee at the Hong Kong office of the engineering firm Arup joined a video call with people he understood to be his chief financial officer and several colleagues. Over the course of the day he executed fifteen transfers totalling roughly HK$200m, about US$25.6m.

Every other participant on the call was an AI-generated impersonation.

He had been suspicious of the original email. That is the part worth sitting with. The control he used to test it — speaking to the people involved, seeing their faces — was the control the firm had adopted precisely because email could not be trusted.