Singapore Prime Minister Deepfake; $4.9m Loss

Added: 2026-05-27

[00:00:00]What would you do if you got a Zoom call from Singapore's [music] Prime Minister?

[00:00:04]For one Singaporean businessman, that answer cost him 4.9 million Sing dollars because it wasn't PM Wong at all. The entire call was a deepfake. Now, how this started was from a WhatsApp call from someone who was posing as the secretary to the cabinet.

[00:00:21]The businessman was then invited to a Zoom call with the president, with Prime Minister Wong, with Minister Indranee Rajah, and what looked like the foreign minister of Canada. The story they told him that they needed urgent funding for the Strait of Hormuz situation, and they promised that the Singapore government will pay him back in 15 business [music] days. But there was a very clear tell.

[00:00:44]The lips didn't quite sync with the audio. And for the quality of today's exchanges, your presence reflects the importance of the matters discussed.

[00:00:53]And the police department even released the deepfake footage on 16th May, so you can see exactly what a fake Prime [music] Minister looks like in real time. But the thing is, this is not something that's happening one-off.

[00:01:03]Operation Frontier Plus Three, which just [music] wrapped up this month, has arrested more than 3,000 people across [music] 10 jurisdictions with 963 million Sing dollars in scam losses and over 130 arrests just in Singapore alone. But the thing that kind of scares me the most about this whole situation is that the deepfake wasn't even that good. It looked like it was an older model. And the thing is, new models actually drop every single week, each one of them more convincing than the last. If this version could cost someone 4.9 million Sing dollars, what happens when the next one is flawless?