Intesa Sanpaolo loses €95M to a WhatsApp message and a cloned voice

On 23 February, Paolo Molesini, then chairman of Fideuram, the private banking arm of Intesa Sanpaolo, received a WhatsApp message from an unknown number that appeared to come from Carlo Messina, the group's chief executive. It said Intesa needed to buy a foreign bank it could not acquire directly, that the deal had to stay secret because a leak could bring in Consob, Italy's markets regulator, and that a lawyer would be in touch. A call followed from what sounded like Paolo Nastasi, managing partner of A&O Shearman in Italy and someone Molesini knew. The voice had been cloned with AI. Molesini asked Fideuram's finance department to make a series of transfers, and €95 million went abroad.

Nothing in this attack was technically new. What made it work was the order of the steps. The message set up the request and the reason to keep it quiet. The call supplied a second, familiar voice, the one a careful person waits for before acting. Emails that appeared to come from the law firm then supplied the account details. Each channel vouched for the others, so the instinct to check through a second channel had already been satisfied, by the attackers.

• —A WhatsApp message from an unknown number, written as the group chief executive.
• —A reason for secrecy: a confidential acquisition that a leak could expose to the regulator.
• —A confirming call from a lawyer the target knew, his voice replicated with AI. He had no part in it.
• —Emails in the law firm's name carrying the foreign account details.
• —A series of transfers from Fideuram's treasury, mainly to accounts in China and Hong Kong.

Fideuram spotted irregularities in the transfers quickly and alerted banks and authorities in several countries through interbank channels. A Chinese bank froze and returned about €40 million, and Milan prosecutors, working with Lisbon through Eurojust, had about €13 million seized in Portugal: roughly €53 million recovered in all. About €36 million is still missing after passing through accounts abroad and into cryptocurrency.

Milan prosecutors have placed a foreign national living outside Europe under investigation on suspicion of computer fraud; Italian outlets report he is a 48 year old Israeli citizen. Molesini stepped down as chairman in March, citing personal reasons. Neither he nor any other Fideuram executive is under investigation, and Intesa Sanpaolo and Fideuram declined to comment.

The call was the step that closed the deal, and it is the step a detector can score. A cloned voice leaves traces in the frequency distribution and timing of speech that survive a phone line, and a verdict during the call arrives while there is still time to stop a transfer rather than to chase one. Voice notes that arrive on WhatsApp can be checked the same way, forwarded to a detection bot.

1. 01Score calls that ask for money to move, whoever they claim to come from.
2. 02Treat a confirming call that arrives as announced in the request as part of the request, not as verification of it.
3. 03Verify through a number already on file, never through a contact or account the request supplied.
4. 04Give anyone approving a large transfer explicit permission to delay it, secrecy or not.