AI Photo:VCG

The head of a company in East China's Fujian Province was cheated out of 4.3 million yuan ($0.61 million) by fraudulent gangs using AI to change faces. With the widespread use of AI technology, AI fraud is showing a trend of scale, which can defraud a large number of users at the same time, causing a wider range of harm to the society.

Guo, head of a technology company, suddenly received a video call from a "friend" saying that he needed a deposit of 4.3 million yuan by using Guo's company account. The friend claimed to have transferred the money to Guo's account and sent a screenshot of the transfer to Guo via messages.

Guo transferred the money to the account number provided by the person in the video in two transactions.

What he didn't expect was that his friend denied that he had proposed a transfer with Guo. Only then did Guo realize that he had encountered a "high-end" scam, with the fraud using the AI face-changing technology to pretend to be a friend of him.

Guo immediately called the police to report the case after the incident happened. The police and the bank successfully intercepted 3.3684 million yuan in a timely manner. But 931,600 yuan had still been transferred and police are trying to recover it.

With the application of AI technology, it is common to commit fraud by using "AI face-changing and voice-changing", the Internet Society of China (ISC) said on Wednesday, noting that the public should be vigilant and take better precautions against new scams using AI technology.