Dubai $35M voice-cloning fraud against UAE bank
Date: 2020-01
Affected: UAE bank / Japanese company
Attack vector: deepfake
Category: real-world
Severity: Critical

Fraudsters used AI voice cloning to impersonate a company director and direct a UAE bank manager to authorize roughly USD 35 million in wire transfers, in one of the earliest publicly documented large-scale voice-clone BEC attacks. The recovered funds were minimal and the case became a benchmark for vishing-style AI fraud.


Mitigations:

Architectural layers (MAESTRO):