Overview
- The Ministry of Home Affairs’ National Cybercrime Threat Analytics Unit issued an advisory describing fraudsters who use AI to turn collected facial recordings into realistic deepfakes that can impersonate victims.
- NCTAU says the scams follow a four-step pattern: initial contact via social or job platforms, solicitation of on‑camera actions, AI synthesis of the recordings, and use of synthetic identities to try to bypass authentication.
- Authorities warned these deepfakes can defeat facial authentication, liveness verification, Video‑KYC and account recovery processes if systems lack proper detection controls.
- The advisory urges financial firms and fintechs to deploy robust deepfake‑detection in onboarding, and tells individuals to lock biometric profiles, monitor alerts for odd logins, and report incidents on the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal.
- Officials stressed the notice is a trends alert rather than evidence of a specific breach and flagged SIM‑swap signs such as sudden mobile service loss as a likely indicator of related fraud attempts.