Binance’s chief communications officer, Patrick Hillmann, revealed that online scammers created a Deepfake profile of him and duped crypto community members into online meetings with him.
Deepfakes are video forgeries in which people appear to say things they did not say.
Hillmann has received several online messages in the last month thanking him for taking the time to meet with project teams about potential opportunities to list their assets on Binance.com.
“This was odd because I don’t have any oversight of or insight into Binance listings, nor had I met with any of these people before,” he said in a blogpost.
It turned out that a sophisticated hacking team used previous news interviews and TV appearances to create a Deepfake of him over the years.
“Other than the 15 pounds that I gained during Covid being noticeably absent, this deep fake was refined enough to fool several highly intelligent crypto community members,” Hillmann said.
Aside from this most recent incident, there has been a recent increase in hackers impersonating Binance employees and executives on platforms such as Twitter, LinkedIn, and Telegram, among others.
“We are prepared to defend our users and our ecosystem. After all, we have the largest and most experienced cybersecurity team in the industry,” he mentioned.
Deepfake photos and videos of Hollywood actor Tom Cruise went viral on various social media platforms last year, thanks to the work of a visual effects specialist.
The TikTok account @deeptomcruise has amassed tens of thousands of followers and likes.
In 2020, popular forged videos of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi went viral.
