{"id":19952,"date":"2022-08-25T16:10:26","date_gmt":"2022-08-26T00:10:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2022\/08\/25\/news-13685\/"},"modified":"2022-08-25T16:10:26","modified_gmt":"2022-08-26T00:10:26","slug":"news-13685","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2022\/08\/25\/news-13685\/","title":{"rendered":"Binance chief says a \u201csophisticated hacking team\u201d turned him into a deepfake hologram"},"content":{"rendered":"

Deepfakes are back, and causing major problems for people involved in financial circles. Scammers have been targeting people in the cryptocurrency community for some time now. There’s huge money to be made via the act of ripping folks off. Some of it is phishing, other attacks focus on breaking into currency exchanges. A few of these have dabbled in (very poorly done) Elon Musk deepfakes<\/a>. The clips are bad, the voice an overt mashup of clipped and broken dialogue. All in all: not very convincing.<\/p>\n

Well, scammers are back for another go.<\/p>\n

Behold the Deepfake hologram<\/h2>\n

In this case, it’s a deepfake hologram impersonating Patrick Hillmann, Chief Communications Officer (CCO) at Binance. Hillman states that a “sophisticated hacking team” raided the old footage archives. News interviews, TV appearances, anything that they could get their hands on. The aim of the game? To use this footage and create a convincing deepfake.<\/p>\n

The Hillmann deepfake was then used in a variety of scenarios to trick people, he said. The scam involved “potential opportunities to list their assets on Binance.com”. At least one incident involves someone ending up in a Zoom call with a “hologram”. We assume this is some sort of old hologram style marketing material repurposed for the bogus Zoom call. Or perhaps the person calling it a hologram is simply unfamiliar with this technology and just calling it a hologram because of that.<\/p>\n

Fooling the community<\/h2>\n

While no footage of these fakes currently exists, Hillmann claims that these calls fooled “several highly intelligent crypto community members”. These individuals no doubt have some sort of familiarity with the people being used in the scam, so they must have been somewhat decently put together. Still: one person’s incredibly convincing deepfake is another person’s Playstation 2 full motion video emulator. Without seeing one of these in action, we may never know for sure.<\/p>\n

There is also no word as to which projects were targeted by the scammers, or investment numbers\/finance requests. Did anybody make off with some cash? We don’t know.<\/p>\n

Avoiding cryptocurrency Deepfake scammers<\/h2>\n

Here are some tips from Binance in relation to avoiding scams like this one:<\/p>\n