Dissected: How scammers built a fake Zoom call from real videos of PM Wong and other Singapore leaders

In April 2022, then-Finance Minister Lawrence Wong participated in a government press conference via video link from the United States. Four years later, scammers used footage from that call to create a convincing fake Zoom conference. The victim, believing that Wong, along with other Singaporean and global leaders, was seeking financial help to stabilize trade flows in the Strait of Hormuz, transferred at least S$4.9 million to the scammers.

The Singapore Police Force (SPF) shared a full recording of the Zoom call with CNA, which conducted an analysis uncovering various techniques used to create the scam. These included the use of obscure or dated YouTube videos of high-profile figures alongside deceptive methods to make the fabricated event convincing. Nine real individuals, including Wong, Indranee Rajah, and Tharman Shanmugaratnam, were presented as participants in the scam call.

The footage of Indranee was taken from a March 2023 interview, while Wong and Shanmugaratnam's videos were sourced from public appearances. The scammers replaced the original audio tracks with synthetic speech, possibly AI-generated or recorded by another person, resulting in visible lip movements not aligning with speech. Additionally, a 15-second sequence in the fake Zoom call could not be traced to any source videos, possibly produced by AI or by stitching together pieces of real footage.