When Seeing Isn’t Believing: Deepfakes, Financial Markets, and the Limits of EU Enforcement

In finance, trust is everything, but what happens when even our eyes and ears fail us? Recent cases show this is no longer a theoretical concern. Deepfake technology, powered by neural networks trained on massive datasets, can analyze audio, video, and images to produce highly realistic impersonations and edits, creating increasingly convincing fake media. This then could be used by fraudsters to commit crime. example, in one incident, a multinational corporation lost 25 million USD after fraudsters used deepfake video technology to impersonate its CFO during a live video call. In another, British energy executive wired funds after “speaking” with someone he thought was his CEO, only to later discover the voice was synthetic. Scenarios like these are now increasingly common. In a recent article, I co-authored with Dr. Michal Lavi, “Seeing is Believing? Deepfakes in Financial Markets,” we examine this emerging phenomenon, and suggest that more preventive enforcement strategy needs to be used to address this issue.

Continue reading “When Seeing Isn’t Believing: Deepfakes, Financial Markets, and the Limits of EU Enforcement”