HSBC puts faces to 'invisible' fraudsters in global blitz

HSBC is launching the next phase of its global fraud prevention campaign designed to educate the public about fraudsters’ tactics, using digital humans constructed from voice recordings of real scammers.

Devised by Wunderman Thompson, “The Faces of Fraud” campaign uses AI technology that it is claimed can identify characteristics, such as gender, ethnicity, weight and age, to predict what a fraudster’s face might look like based on voice data.

With global losses from payment fraud expected to hit £40.6bn by 2027 – a 25% increase from 2020 levels – Wunderman Thompson has worked with Carnegie Mellon University, to feed in voice recordings of actual fraudsters into a neural network to generate face composites that predict facial features based on the speaker’s unique “audible DNA”.

The predicted faces of the fraudsters informed the creation of various digital humans using Epic Game’s Unreal engine creation platform Metahumans. Wunderman Thompson then brought these digital ‘fraudsters’ to life using motion capture.

The digital fraudsters share their tricks with the public in a series of online tutorials which finally put a face to a faceless crime, from romance to investment fraud.

Wunderman Thompson global chief creative officer Bas Korsten said: “There’s a distinct shame around being taken in by fraud and no-one is immune. We’re proud to have helped HSBC develop this pioneering piece of technology and place them firmly at the forefront of this ever-evolving fraud landscape.

“Our hope is that by giving these fraudsters a face, we can educate the public on the tactics that are used to scam them out of their hard-earned money, and lower the rate of fraud across the world.”

Dr Rita Singh, Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, added: “There is certainly the impetus of science behind this endeavour, but such ingenious use of this technology exemplifies the ultimate power of human creativity in societal advancement.

“When my team was approached by Wunderman Thompson to help HSBC, we were honoured to be able to do so. It’s tremendously gratifying for us to see years of research come to fruition in this way and we hope it helps to keep people safe from fraudsters.”