A Deepfake Call Cost Italy’s Biggest Bank €95 Million

A WhatsApp message and a cloned voice were enough to shake Italy’s biggest private bank. Fideuram, the banking arm of Intesa Sanpaolo, was tricked into sending €95 million to Asia after fraudsters posed as senior executives, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The scheme began in February. Paolo Molesini, then chairman of Fideuram, got a WhatsApp message that looked as if it came from Intesa Sanpaolo chief executive Carlo Messina, asking for urgent help with an overseas transaction. Soon after, a supposed senior partner at a major law firm called to back it up. The voice was fake, recreated with A.I. Believing the request was real, Molesini told the finance team to move the money, mostly to accounts in China and Hong Kong.

Molesini resigned in March, saying at the time that the decision was for personal reasons. He and other Fideuram executives are not being investigated. Milan prosecutors are instead looking into a foreign national living outside Europe on suspicion of computer fraud.

Fideuram spotted the oddities quickly and brought in authorities across several countries. Work between investigators in China, Portugal and Italy recovered about €53 million. Roughly €36 million is still missing after being routed through overseas accounts and turned into cryptocurrency, according to AML Intelligence.

This wasn’t a one-off, and it wasn’t even the first Italian version. In 2025, businessman and former Inter Milan president Massimo Moratti was fooled by an A.I. voice scam and sent nearly €1 million after fraudsters impersonated Defense Minister Guido Crosetto. That money was later recovered. Abroad, the Arup case in 2024 showed the same thing from another angle: an employee in Hong Kong transferred about $25 million after a video call with fake colleagues. At €95 million, the Fideuram case is now being treated as one of the biggest known deepfake frauds anywhere.