The deepfake CEOs
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 23 February 2026
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Fraudsters are increasingly using deepfake videos of CEOs and other company executives to trick firms out of millions of dollars. And with the evolution of AI, these videos are becoming ever-more sophisticated and convincing.
We speak to two CEOs who have been deepfaked: the head of the Bombay stock exchange and the boss of password security company LastPass. And we hear how criminals used deepfake videos to trick British engineering firm Arup into handing over $25 million.
How easy is it to make these videos? Ed Butler visits a cybersecurity company which shows him how it can be done, using readily available software. Ed's hosts make a deepfake of him and we compare the real Ed to the fake Ed. We also put figures on the size of this problem and explain how much it's costing businesses.
If you'd like to get in touch with the team, our email address is businessdaily@bbc.co.uk
Presenter: Ed Butler Producer: Gideon Long Sound Mix: Toby James
Business Daily is the home of in-depth audio journalism devoted to the world of money and work. From small startup stories to big corporate takeovers, global economic shifts to trends in technology, we look at the key figures, ideas and events shaping business.
Each episode is a 17-minute deep dive into a single topic, featuring expert analysis and the people at the heart of the story.
Recent episodes explore the weight-loss drug revolution, the growth in AI, the cost of living, why bond markets are so powerful, China's property bubble, and Gen Z's experience of the current job market.
We also feature in-depth interviews with company founders and some of the world's most prominent CEOs. These include Google's Sundar Pichai, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and the CEO of Starbucks, Brian Niccol.
(Picture: An image of a man in a cap being deepfaked. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, radio, podcasts. |
| 0:06.7 | Hi there, I'm Ed Butler. |
| 0:08.6 | Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:11.9 | Today, we're looking at the scary world of deep fake technology |
| 0:15.7 | and how CEOs these days are reacting when they find themselves a target. |
| 0:21.8 | If you are in my position, how would you feel the same way I feel? |
| 0:25.1 | Nobody should incur a loss by believing something which is untrue. |
| 0:29.1 | Some call this a new front line in online scamming. |
| 0:33.1 | Could deep fake be costing companies billions and how deep does it go? |
| 0:37.8 | Deep fakes are becoming very, very easy to do to actually generate video and audio quality of |
| 0:44.8 | extremely accurate specifications. It takes minutes. |
| 0:49.3 | The deepfakes scam business, that's Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:07.5 | It's early 2024. And in Hong Kong, an employee of the British engineering firm Arab. |
| 1:12.4 | Let's just call her Joanne for the purposes of this program. She gets a message from company headquarters in London regarding what's described as a confidential transaction. |
| 1:19.9 | Joanne gets onto the video call with Arabs, Chief Financial Officer and other staff to find out |
| 1:25.0 | more. And then, according to the Hong Kong police, she transfers |
| 1:29.7 | 25 million US dollars of Arab money to five different bank accounts. This was as instructed |
| 1:37.4 | from her employers. It only later emerged that the people on the call, including the CFO, were all deep fakes, digital creations, |
| 1:48.5 | not real people. This actually happened and it is a sobering reminder of how dangerous and how |
| 1:56.5 | convincing deep fake videos can be. |
| 2:03.2 | With me in the studio is Stephanie Hare. |
| 2:07.2 | She's a researcher and a presenter of BBC AI Decoded. |
... |
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