Singapore police released footage of a deepfake Zoom call featuring PM Lawrence Wong, President Tharman and other officials. One victim lost S$4.9 million.
The Zoom call looked like the kind of meeting a well-connected businessman might be invited to once in a career. On the screen: Singapore’s Prime Minister Lawrence Wong, President Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Minister Indranee Rajah, officials from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), the foreign minister of Canada, a senior diplomatic adviser to the president of the United Arab Emirates, and executives from BlackRock and the Dubai International Financial Centre. The subject of the meeting: urgent funding tied to the situation at the Strait of Hormuz.
None of them were real.
The Singapore Police Force released footage of the Zoom video conference on 16 May 2026, two days after confirming that one victim had transferred at least S$4.9 million (about US$3.8 million) to scammers who had staged the fake meeting. According to police, the conference was fabricated, with portions edited using deepfake AI technology, and ended with a deepfake of Wong delivering closing remarks that acknowledged the victim’s attendance.
Government-impersonation scams in Singapore have been around for years. The level of production around this one is what stands out. The case marks one of the most elaborate uses of deepfake video yet documented in the country: a multi-person fake boardroom, populated with real-world public figures, built around a plausible geopolitical pretext.
How the trick worked
The scam unfolded in stages. The victim, described by police only as a business professional, first received a WhatsApp message bearing the profile photo of Wong Hong Kuan, Singapore’s actual Secretary to the Cabinet. It asked him to attend a meeting with the prime minister. A follow-up email came from an address ending in proton.me, requesting “urgent funding assistance relating to the situation at the Straits of Hormuz” and attaching what appeared to be an official letter of guarantee bearing PM Wong’s signature, promising the funds would be reimbursed within 15 business days.
The victim was asked to sign a Non-Disclosure Agreement and to supply a copy of his identification. He did.
He was then invited to the Zoom call, where the deepfaked officials walked through the supposed crisis and welcomed him as a private-sector participant. After the meeting, a scammer posing as a lawyer made contact and instructed him to transfer funds to a corporate bank account. He moved at least S$4.9 million across multiple transactions before realising, on 14 May 2026, that he had been deceived. He contacted the real Secretary to the Cabinet, who confirmed the meeting had never taken place.
The tells in the footage
When police released the footage two days later, they noted several signs the call had been faked. Speech did not synchronise with the speakers’ lips, suggesting inauthentic audio had been layered over the video. The sound came through a single account throughout the call rather than from individual participants. The background appeared distorted, with a Zoom logo that did not align with the rest of the foreground.
These tells are subtle in isolation. In aggregate, they describe the current state of consumer-grade deepfake tooling: convincing enough to clear a first glance, especially under the social pressure of a meeting that includes a head of state and an apparently urgent geopolitical crisis. The Strait of Hormuz pretext was useful for the scammers in another way too. It supplied a plausible reason for the secrecy, the NDA, the strange channel, and the speed of the funding ask.
A category that is growing fast
Singapore’s overall scam losses fell in 2025, but government-impersonation scams ran the other way. According to the Singapore Police Force’s Annual Scam and Cybercrime Brief 2025, cases in this category jumped from 1,504 in 2024 to 3,363 in 2025, a rise of 123.6 per cent. Reported losses reached about S$242.9 million, placing it among the highest-loss scam types in the country.
The S$4.9 million case is not the only deepfake-driven incident on the books. In March 2025, a Singapore finance director transferred more than US$499,000 to scammers after attending a Zoom call in which AI-generated avatars of his chief financial officer and other senior executives appeared to instruct him to do so.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore flagged the threat to the financial sector in a September 2025 information paper, identifying three principal risks from synthetic media: defeating biometric authentication, enabling social-engineering and impersonation scams, and facilitating misinformation and disinformation.
What the police are saying
In its 16 May statement, the Singapore Police Force reiterated that Singapore government officials will “never” ask members of the public to transfer money, disclose bank login details, install apps from unofficial app stores or transfer calls to police or other government agencies over email, phone or video.
Three individuals were arrested and charged on 9 May 2026 in connection with earlier cases that used the same modus operandi, for offences related to SIM cards. The wider investigation is ongoing.
The police also urged the public to verify suspicious content through the 24-hour ScamShield helpline at 1799 or via scamshield.gov.sg and to assess unfamiliar video footage for the kind of small inconsistencies that gave the fake conference away. Cyber Security Agency of Singapore guidance, summarised in the same release, encourages people to assess the source, context and aim of any message they receive, then to analyse audio-visual elements for unnatural lip movement, audio routing and background artefacts.
What the case signals
A fake voice on the phone has been a known scam ingredient for years. A fake face in a one-on-one video call has been documented globally for at least two. A fake multi-person government boardroom, staged with named officials, a geopolitical pretext, signed paperwork and a polite closing acknowledgement of the target, is a different category of fabrication.
It is also, on the available evidence, working.
The video released by the Singapore Police Force gives the public a rare on-the-record look at what one of these calls now looks like. Whether that exposure helps the next person on the receiving end of a WhatsApp message from the “Secretary to the Cabinet” pause for a second look will be the more interesting test in the months ahead.
