Earlier in April this year, an interesting story surfaced revealing how scammers are using AI-generated images to represent fake law firm and scam unsuspecting users and businesses. This time around, scammers have taken scamming techniques a notch higher by creating a Deepfake hologram of one of Binance executives. For your information, Binance is the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange.
Binance’s chief communication officer, Patrick Hillmann revealed that a “sophisticated” team of hackers is using video footage of his previous television appearances and interviews and digitally modifying it to make his AI hologram.
Using this Deepfake hologram, the scammers trick people into online meetings and target Binance clients and their crypto projects.
“Other than the 15 pounds that I gained during Covid being noticeably absent, this deepfake was refined enough to fool several highly intelligent crypto community members.”
Patrick Hillmann – Binance
He also confirmed receiving numerous online messages thanking him for meeting project teams and discussing potential opportunities for listing their assets on Binance.com. That’s odd since Hillmann claims he has no insight or oversight into Binance listings and he never met with project teams before.
In a detailed blog post, Hillmann wrote that he has previously led one of the largest cybersecurity teams in the world and managed some of digital history’s largest data breaches, including Ashley Madison, but still, he wasn’t prepared for the overwhelming onslaught of phishing attacks, cybercrimes, and scams targeting crypto fraternity regularly.
Binance PR exec also noted that there has been an unprecedented spike in hackers fooling people as Binance employees and executives of popular social media platforms like Twitter, Telegram, and LinkedIn.
Hillmann also posted a screenshot of the project manager in a Zoom meeting with him. Hillmann denied any such meeting and said it wasn’t him.
