Italian tycoons targeted by fake defence minister in suspected AI scam

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Italy’s business elite has been roiled by a scam that used an artificial intelligence-generated voice mimicking Italian defence minister Guido Crosetto to ask tycoons to wire millions to overseas bank accounts to help pay ransoms to free Italian journalists kidnapped overseas.

The scam targeted some of Italy’s most powerful business barons, including Pirelli chair Marco Tronchetti Provera, fashion designer Giorgio Armani, Prada co-founder Patrizio Bertelli, Tod’s owner Diego Della Valle, former Inter Milan owner Massimo Moratti and members of the billionaire Beretta and Menarini families, a person with knowledge of the investigation said.

While many were immediately suspicious, at least one was persuaded to transfer €1mn to overseas bank accounts, after being falsely reassured that he would be reimbursed by the Bank of Italy later for the payment. So far, three Milanese businesspeople have filed formal complaints to the city’s prosecutor’s office, including one who fell victim to the scam.

Authorities familiar with the case say the fraud involved multiple rounds of calls from people posing as Crosetto’s staff and the apparent use of AI to convincingly simulate Crosetto’s voice. Targets were told that Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s government needed their help to rescue Italian journalists kidnapped in the Middle East. 

“The voice of the minister was reproduced,” a defence ministry official said. “It was asking for money to pay ransom for Italian journalists kidnapped in the world. The fake Crosetto said, ‘I cannot pay with ministry money, but you will get the money back from the Bank of Italy’. It was a hoax. It was not true.”

Investigators said the calls appeared to come from telephone numbers belonging to the defence minister’s staff — which they believed had been cloned.

The scammers moved just weeks after Meloni’s government negotiated a high-profile hostage swap in which a young Italian journalist, Cecilia Sala, was freed from Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison, in exchange for Rome returning an Iranian engineer wanted in the US for a scheme that provided sophisticated US drone technology to Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.

Crosetto first sounded the alarm of “a serious ongoing scam” in a social media post last week, saying he wanted to raise public awareness so that “no one runs the risk of falling into the trap”.

The minister said he first discovered the fraud after being contacted by a prominent entrepreneur whom he had not previously met and who had transferred a large sum to a bank account detailed by a fake “General Giovanni Montalbano” after speaking to someone that the businessman was convinced was Crosetto himself. 

Crosetto said he later received calls from several other top entrepreneurs that had been contacted by people purporting to be members of his staff trying to organise the rescue of Italian journalists in the Middle East.

The Bank of Italy on Friday warned that fraudsters were improperly using its name and logo to promise that the central bank would reimburse money that wealthy entrepreneurs invested as contributions to the fake rescue scheme. 

“Banca d’Italia is in no way related to any of these requests,” the statement said, as it warned people not to respond and report such overtures to relevant authorities.

Italy’s business elite are not the first to be targeted by scams preying on wealthy individuals eager to do discreet favours for a government seeking to rescue hostages.

A decade ago in France, more than 150 corporate chiefs, heads of state, ambassadors and religious leaders were contacted in an audacious scam when a man claiming to be then French defence minister Jean-Yves Le Drian requested millions of euros for top-secret government operations, including freeing French journalists held hostage in Syria. 

Though most sensed something awry, the scammers managed to collect $85mn, including nearly $20mn from the late Aga Khan, leader of the world’s Ismaili Muslims. The ringleader Gilbert Chikli, a Franco-Israeli, was convicted on multiple counts of fraud in 2020 and sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Additional reporting by Giuliana Ricozzi