A Deepfake Call Cost Italy’s Biggest Bank €95 Million

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A WhatsApp message from the boss and a phone call with a cloned voice were all it took to relieve Italy’s biggest bank of €95 million. Fraudsters used A.I. to pose as senior executives and tricked Fideuram, the private banking arm of Intesa Sanpaolo, into wiring money to Asia, Reuters reports, citing two people familiar with the matter.

How the Scam Worked

It started in February with a message that seemed to come from the very top. The scheme at a glance:

• The message: Paolo Molesini, then the chairman of Fideuram, received a WhatsApp message that appeared to come from Intesa Sanpaolo’s chief executive, Carlo Messina, asking for urgent help with an overseas transaction.
• The call: Shortly afterward, a supposed senior partner at a prominent law firm confirmed the request by phone. The fraudsters had recreated his voice using A.I.
• The transfers: Believing the requests were genuine, Molesini instructed the finance department to send the money, mostly to accounts in China and Hong Kong.

Molesini resigned in March, citing personal reasons at the time. Neither he nor other Fideuram executives are under investigation. Instead, Milan prosecutors are investigating a foreign national living outside Europe for computer fraud.

€53 Million Recovered, the Rest Gone to Crypto

Fideuram did detect the irregularities quickly and alerted authorities in several countries. Cooperation among investigators in China, Portugal and Italy recovered about €53 million. But roughly €36 million is still missing after being moved through overseas accounts and converted into cryptocurrency, AML Intelligence reports.

Italy Has Seen This Before

The trick isn’t new in Italy. In 2025, businessman and former Inter Milan president Massimo Moratti fell for an A.I. voice scam and transferred nearly €1 million after fraudsters posed as Defense Minister Guido Crosetto. That money was later recovered.

Internationally, the case of the British engineering firm Arup served as a wake-up call: in 2024, an employee in Hong Kong transferred about $25 million after a video call with faked colleagues. At €95 million, the Fideuram scam is likely one of the largest known deepfake cases in the world.

Why Banks Need to Catch Up

The case shows how cheap and convincing voice clones have become. A few seconds of audio from interviews or videos are enough to recreate a voice convincingly, and top executives at large companies are especially easy to find on the record. Classic security rules such as confirming by callback offer little protection when the callback also reaches a fake voice.

Security firms therefore advise companies to set up fixed approval processes in which large transfers are never confirmed through a single channel, and to agree on code words for emergencies. At the same time, companies such as Pindrop and Reality Defender are building tools designed to detect fake voices in real time. For Europe’s banks, the case is likely to be an expensive reason to review exactly those safeguards.