In May 2026, a man in Singapore joined a Zoom call that appeared to include Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, other senior government officials, and international figures. The faces were familiar. The setting looked credible. The conversation concerned an investment opportunity.
But the meeting was not what it seemed. Scammers had assembled it using real video footage, manipulated audio, deepfake AI, and fake meeting graphics. By the time the deception was uncovered, the victim had transferred at least S$4.9 million.
The case exposes an uncomfortable weakness in the way we use video. Seeing someone we recognize and hearing them speak has traditionally given us a strong reason to believe we know who is on the other side of the call. Deepfakes are making that assumption increasingly difficult to rely on.
And the risk goes beyond financial fraud. The same techniques can be used to gain access to confidential information, damage reputations, spread misinformation, or disrupt agendas. All through a simple video meeting where you fully believe you know and trust the person on the screen.
So, what can we do to disrupt a deepfake in meetings?
When you are looking at a deepfake over video, you are really looking at AI that has mapped the facial movements of one person onto another person’s face. Essentially, the likeness of that person, let’s say your boss, has been superimposed onto the face of the threat actor, in real time.
It’s very realistic, as we’ve seen through multiple examples, but fortunately there are a few ways to make it harder for an impersonator to gain access to a meeting.
At Pexip, we recommend several key counter measures:
- Implement authentication measures. In other words, don’t make your meeting easy to join. Create a protocol instead which requires your participants to verify their identity through a multi-factor identification process.
Authentication establishes that the person joining the meeting is connected to a verified identity, rather than asking other participants to judge whether the face and voice they see on screen are genuine.
- Protect your meeting with a PIN. Though authentication is by far the best prevention measure, a PIN can be helpful in delaying the attacker. Be smart about your PIN and make it as complicated and hard-to-guess as possible so that it’s as difficult as can be for impersonators to access your meeting.
- Host one-time video meetings. These are video meetings with long and random dial-in aliases that are only valid for a single meeting. This could serve as another line of defense, making it harder for intruders to ‘guess’ their way into your private meeting.
For higher-risk conversations, organizations can go further by combining authentication with authorization and policy-based access controls. These controls can determine not only whether someone has verified their identity, but whether they should be allowed into a particular meeting in the first place.
Learn how smart access control can help build resilience against deepfake video calls.
Protect your video meeting as deepfakes evolve
Deepfakes challenge one of the basic assumptions we make when communicating over video: that seeing and hearing someone we recognize is enough to establish who they are. Increasingly, it isn’t.
That makes identity and access control an important part of video meeting security. Rather than relying on participants to recognize a fake, organizations can put controls in place to verify who is joining and limit access to the people who should be there.
Read our guide to access control in video conference: Access Control & Authentication for Video Meetings.
Find out more about Pexip Secure Meetings and how you can reduce risks and protect sensitive conversations.
Originally published November 4, 2024
- Secure collaboration
- Secure Meetings
