By
Tuhu Nugraha
Africa-Press – Lesotho. Public debate on deepfake threats in finance remains muted compared to politics. A manipulated video of a candidate goes viral and sparks instant outrage; a fraudulent video call inside a bank leaves no trace beyond a drained account. Yet the stakes are enormous. Political deepfakes seek to sway opinion and create noise. Financial deepfakes are hidden “surgical strikes,” targeting one trusted employee—such as a finance officer or bank manager—to authorize multi-million dollar transfers. Their invisibility makes them even more dangerous, demanding responses that are technical, procedural, and internal.
This contrast explains why financial risks rarely dominate headlines, even though their consequences can shake economies. The same vulnerability runs through both spheres: human psychology. Attackers exploit not just systems, but minds—weaponizing sight and sound in ways that can unravel the fragile trust on which modern finance rests.
Most Cyberattacks Exploit People, Not Just Technology
While headlines focus on technical breaches, most cyber incidents succeed because of human vulnerabilities. The 2023 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) found that 74% of breaches involved the human element—from social engineering and misuse of access rights to simple mistakes. Pretexting, the creation of false but convincing scenarios to mislead employees, is rising fast. In short, attackers are no longer just hacking systems, they are hacking minds.
This is precisely what makes deepfake technology so threatening for global finance. By manipulating voices, faces, and even entire video conferences, deepfakes weaponize our instinct to trust what we see and hear. Financial institutions are no longer only defending servers—they are defending reality itself.
Who the Actors Are—and What Drives Them
Deepfake fraud is appealing because it is cheap, accessible, and effective. This draws in a diverse range of actors with varied motivations:
Nation-states: destabilizing rival economies or sparking market panic as part of hybrid warfare.
Terrorist groups: generating funds that evade traditional AML regimes.
Organized crime: chasing fast, large-scale gains via Scams-as-a-Service.
Hackers-for-hire: paid contractors for corporations or hostile governments.
Individuals and hobbyists: motivated by thrill, ideology, or skill-testing.
Hacktivists: eroding trust in finance as protest.
Corporate espionage agents: discrediting competitors or manipulating financial announcements.
The diversity of actors and motives makes attribution extremely complex. A fraud can be designed in one country, executed from servers in another, financed by actors elsewhere, and target institutions in yet another jurisdiction. For regulators, this is crime layered with geopolitics.
Fragmented Rules in a Borderless Threat
Every jurisdiction has its own approach. The EU’s AI Act emphasizes transparency and rights; China mandates strict labeling; the U.S. regulates piecemeal at the state level. Meanwhile, Global South countries such as Indonesia, India, and Brazil are still building their frameworks, often relying on broader IT or data laws rather than explicit provisions on deepfakes. Fraud, however, ignores borders. For global banks, this patchwork is as dangerous as the deepfakes themselves. A large cross-border attack could trigger liquidity shocks as fraudulent transfers ripple through interbank systems, a loss of trust leading to mass withdrawals, and market manipulation through synthetic press releases or fake executive videos.
Why the Global South Is More Exposed
Readiness gaps between North and South highlight asymmetries:
Technology: Northern banks deploy advanced safeguards like passive liveness detection early. Southern banks often scale digital services faster than they can secure them, leaving exploitable gaps. At the same time, fintech innovation is booming in the South because it is a key pathway to financial inclusion. Populations in countries such as Indonesia, India, and Brazil adopt fintech solutions at far higher rates than in the North, which accelerates access but also widens the security gap.
Regulation: The EU and U.S. have stronger frameworks. In the South, regulators such as Indonesia’s OJK provide governance guidance, but explicit laws criminalizing malicious deepfakes remain absent.
Collaboration: Northern markets benefit from networks like FS-ISAC. In the South, collaboration is improving but still lacks real-time depth.
Digital literacy: Longer experience in the North contrasts with fast but less-informed adoption in the South, making populations more vulnerable to scams.
The result: financial systems in the Global South face higher systemic risks, with weaker resilience when trust erodes.
Systemic Impact—and How It Spills North
Deepfake abuse in the South is not a local issue. It threatens the fragile social contract underpinning digital banking and inclusion—and spreads north through finance, trade, and geopolitics.
Fragile trust collapses: Major scams can spark “digital bank runs.”
Inclusion reverses: If e-KYC feels unsafe, people revert to cash, stalling progress in microfinance and digital transfers.
Remittances disrupted: Fraud raises costs and slows flows, weakening household income and national balances.
Costs rise, innovation slows: Upgrading security increases fees, making services less accessible, while fear curbs fintech innovation.
Macro shocks: A convincing fake central bank announcement can spark capital flight and currency turmoil before truth emerges.
Spillovers north follow quickly: volatility spreads through global portfolios, correspondent banking costs rise, demand from remittance-driven economies falls, and multinational banks face uneven compliance. Deepfakes are a systemic trust shock that binds South and North alike.
From Firewalls to Guardrails
Meeting this challenge requires more than national fixes. Priorities include:
Common Standards: Benchmarks for deepfake detection and biometric verification to avoid weakest-link exploitation.
Multilateral Cooperation: G20, BIS, BRICS, and others should coordinate frameworks for intelligence-sharing and joint response, similar to global AML efforts.
Zero-Trust by Default: Banks must verify every identity and transaction continuously, layering multiple checks into normal practice.
Alongside these, a Penta helix approach—uniting government, industry, academia, civil society, and media—is essential. Literacy must extend beyond financial awareness to cover digital security, technology risks, and the psychology of social engineering. Media, in particular, plays a vital role in educating the public about deepfake threats and building resilience.
Finally, emerging technologies such as blockchain and digital identity anchored in smart contracts can add layers of defense. Blockchain’s immutability provides trusted audit trails, while smart contract IDs create tamper-resistant credentials and transparent provenance for communications. These tools strengthen identity assurance and support cross-border interoperability. In line with broader global discourse, frameworks discussed by think tanks such as Brookings and Chatham House emphasize the importance of integrated standards, cross-border governance, and recognition of geopolitical dynamics. Bringing these perspectives into the conversation ensures that deepfake risks in finance are addressed not only with technical fixes but with systemic, diplomatic, and governance-oriented solutions.
Foresight from a Global South Perspective
The CPF (Creative Permutation Foresight) scenarios highlighted here are not random—they focus on leverage points in Global South economies where government choices can determine whether the impact is contained or amplified. They serve as a bridge between systemic risks and the need for proactive responses.
Trust Collapse in Inclusion Pathways: Deepfake scams undermine e-KYC in microfinance institutions, reversing years of inclusion gains in rural Indonesia or India. Government action through stronger digital ID programs, liability rules, and proactive supervision could prevent such reversals. Without intervention, confidence in inclusion platforms may collapse.
Remittance Shock: Manipulated identity proofs reroute or block billions in remittances from migrant workers in the Gulf to families in South Asia, creating liquidity stress in local economies. Governments that cooperate on cross-border digital ID standards and real-time fraud intelligence can protect this macro-critical lifeline. Without such collaboration, remittance corridors remain highly exposed.
Regulatory Backlash: A high-profile fraud in Brazil forces regulators to impose restrictive measures on fintech, slowing digital finance innovation across Latin America. Governments that pursue balanced, risk-based regulation and public–private collaboration can sustain innovation while closing loopholes. Overly reactive approaches, however, risk chilling entire sectors.
These CPF permutations stress that the trajectory of the Global South is shaped not only by the threats themselves but also by how governments choose to mitigate them. They help contextualize systemic risks and highlight decision points that can alter outcomes.
A Strategic Imperative
Deepfakes are not just another cybercrime trend—they are a structural challenge to how trust itself is defined in finance. If confidence collapses, the system follows. The next financial crisis may not be sparked by subprime debt or sovereign defaults, but by synthetic lies traveling at the speed of code.
The pressing question is whether regulators and banks will act with foresight—building shared guardrails before today’s cracks widen into tomorrow’s fault lines.
Perhaps the most sobering image is not of a boardroom or a trading floor, but of a farmer in rural India. Having placed his trust in a mobile app like UPI for the first time, he falls victim to a convincing deepfake scam. Traumatized, he abandons digital finance and returns to cash. If such stories multiply, the promise of inclusive digital finance in the Global South could unravel—not because the technology failed, but because trust was broken.
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