When a familiar face on a video call can be generated in minutes, trust can no longer rest on what people see. It has to rest on what they can check.
By Mir News Staff · October 16, 2026
When a Video Call Is No Longer Proof
In early 2024, a finance employee at the Hong Kong office of British engineering firm Arup joined what looked like a routine video call with senior colleagues, including the company’s chief financial officer. He had been suspicious of an earlier email asking for a confidential transaction. The call put those doubts to rest. He went on to make 15 transfers totalling HK$200 million, about US$25.6 million.
None of the colleagues on the call were real. Hong Kong police later said the participants had been recreated with deepfake technology, and Arup confirmed that “fake voices and images were used.” The company said its financial stability and internal systems were not affected.
The case has become a reference point for a simple, uncomfortable truth: the old rule that seeing is believing no longer holds. For entrepreneur and business strategist Alessio Vinassa, that shift is not only a technology problem. It is a leadership one.
Why Detection Alone Is Not Enough
Detection tools are improving, and organisations should use them. But synthetic voices and faces are improving too, and every new detector invites a better fake. Companies that rely on spotting the forgery are entering a race that has no finish line.
What deepfakes exploit is rarely a gap in software. It is the moment when a person under pressure accepts an impression as a fact. That is exactly the territory Vinassa’s work focuses on: how leaders make decisions when stakes are high and time is short.
Separating the Event From the Story
In an essay on decision-making under pressure published on his website this week, Vinassa describes a simple discipline: separate what actually happened from the meaning the mind attaches to it. “Describe the event in verifiable terms before deciding what it means,” he writes.
Applied to synthetic media, the distinction is powerful. “A video of the CFO asked me to send money” is an event. “The CFO wants me to send money” is an interpretation. In the Arup case, the gap between those two sentences was worth more than US$25 million.
Vinassa also warns about the quiet risk in polished reasoning. “A confident recommendation can still rest on an assumption nobody has checked,” he writes. A convincing face on a screen is the ultimate confident recommendation.
Urgency Is the Attacker’s Best Tool
Deepfake fraud almost always arrives with pressure attached: a deal that must close today, a payment that must stay confidential, a senior figure who cannot be kept waiting. The goal is to make the target act before thinking.
Vinassa’s answer is not to eliminate emotion but to keep it in its place. “You need enough awareness to stop confusing the intensity of a feeling with the strength of the evidence,” he writes. In a world of synthetic media, that sentence reads almost like a security policy.
Verification as a Leadership Discipline
If deepfakes target judgment, then protecting judgment becomes a leadership responsibility, not a task for the IT department alone. In practice, that means building verification into how an organisation works, so that checking is routine rather than awkward.
Security specialists point to a handful of habits that make the biggest difference: confirming unusual requests through a second, independently known channel; requiring two approvals for large or unusual payments; agreeing on internal code words for sensitive instructions; and treating secrecy and urgency as warning signs rather than reasons to skip steps.
The cultural side matters just as much. A junior employee who fears questioning an instruction from the “CEO” is the easiest target a fraudster can find. Leaders who openly reward people for double-checking, including when the request genuinely came from the top, close that gap. Verification only works when it is safe to verify.
Trust Still Matters. It Is Just Built Differently
None of this means organisations should slide into suspicion of everything they see and hear. The aim is calm, consistent process, not paranoia. As Vinassa puts it, “The goal is not to eliminate fear. It is to prevent fear from becoming an unexamined instruction.”
The same logic applies to trust. In the age of deepfakes, trust is no longer something a face or a voice can grant on its own. It is something a well-led organisation earns, one verified decision at a time. The leaders who understand that early will not just avoid the next fraud. They will build companies that people, partners and markets can rely on.
About Alessio Vinassa
Alessio Vinassa is a serial entrepreneur, business strategist, and thought leader focused on leadership, adaptability, and sustainable growth in global markets. His work spans technology, AI, venture building, and human performance, mentoring founders and executives as they navigate complexity, build resilient organizations, and align long-term strategy with execution discipline. For more information, visit www.alessiovinassa.io.
