Today the U.S. Department of Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued an Alert to help financial institutions identify fraud schemes relying in part on the use of deepfake media created through generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). FinCEN specifically notes seeing “an increased in suspicious activity reporting by financial institutions describing the suspected use of deepfake media, particularly the use of fraudulent identity documents to circumvent identity verification and authentication methods.”
The FinCEN Alert states that beginning in 2023 and continuing into this year, FinCEN has noted an uptick in suspicious activity reporting by financial institutions that describe the use of deepfake media in fraud schemes targeting their institutions and customers. The schemes include the altering or creation of fraudulent identity documents to circumvent authentication and verification mechanisms, which has been enabled by the recent rise of GenAI tools. Using those tools, perpetrators can create high-quality deepfakes (highly-realistic GenAI-generated content), including false identity documents and false video content for secondary visual identification, that is indistinguishable from documents or interactions with actual verifiable humans. “For example, some financial institutions have reported that criminals employed GenAI to alter or generate images used for identification documents, such as driver’s licenses or passport cards and books. Criminals can create these deepfake images by modifying an authentic source image or creating a synthetic image. Criminals have also combined GenAI images with stolen personal identifiable information (PII) or entirely fake PII to create synthetic identities.”
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