In 2024 engineering firm Arup lost $25 million dollars after an employee was tricked by a deepfake video call of their manager telling them to to transfer funds to a fraudulent location. The above article is an interview with Rob Greig, who was Arup’s CIO at the time. The interview discusses Greig’s impressions of the incident, lessons learned, and future direction. A short video interview accompanies the text. Not overly technical, this article serves as a reminder of a particularly devastating case study in deepfake fraud, and a high-level intro to the threat of deepfakes as a means of spear-phishing.
