The cloned voice of Defence Minister Guido Crosetto was used in some calls demanding money to free kidnapped journalists.
Some of Italy’s best-known business leaders, including the fashion designer Giorgio Armani and the Prada chair, Patrizio Bertelli, have been targeted by an artificial intelligence-based scam that involved the mimicking of the defence minister’s voice in telephone calls claiming to seek help to free Italian journalists kidnapped in the Middle East.
Prosecutors in Milan have received four legal complaints, including from Massimo Moratti, the former owner of Inter Milan, and a member of the Beretta family, the world’s oldest producer of firearms. The defence minister, Guido Crosetto, on Monday said he would submit a legal complaint after his voice was cloned and used in at least one of the calls.
At least one of the targets is known to have fallen for the scam and was duped into making two transfers totalling €1m to an account in Hong Kong after falsely believing they would be reimbursed by the Bank of Italy.
Crosetto revealed the scam in a social media post after receiving a call last week from a well-known entrepreneur who had transferred a large sum of money to an account after what he was convinced was a conversation with the minister. Then two more people contacted him. He said he chose to make the case public “so that no one runs the risk of falling into the trap”.
Others were targeted by calls claiming to be from Crosetto’s staff, which were made to appear as though they were coming from the defence ministry in Rome.
As of Monday, the legal complaints submitted include one from a member of the Aleotti family, which heads the Menarini pharmaceutical firm, and one from a member of the family that owns the Esselunga supermarket chain. A complaint is also expected to be submitted by Giorgio Armani, whose staff were contacted by the scammers, according to reports in the Italian press.
The first person to file a legal complaint was Moratti, the former football boss and chair of Saras Group, an multinational energy company. “It all seemed real, they were good, it could happen to anyone,” he told La Repubblica.
Lucia Aleotti, a Menarini board member, said the company was saved from the scam by a savvy personal assistant called Chiara. “We receive suspicious phone calls all the time,” she told Corriere della Sera. “Once they tried to sell us a Caravaggio and even a Leonardo. This was certainly not the most difficult scam for our assistant, who is alert and attentive, to recognise.”
Aleotti said the caller had presented himself as a “Dr Giovanni Montalbano”, who claimed to be from the defence ministry and wanted to urgently speak to the company bosses regarding a national security matter.
“The self-styled Montalbano insisted, saying that the minister was at the Nato offices. He left a foreign number to call him back on the same day. The phone call immediately made Chiara suspicious.”
Others targeted by the elaborate scam include the owner of Tod’s, Diego Della Valle, and the executive vice-chair of Pirelli, Marco Tronchetti Provera.
“They are professional scammers who clearly have both the technology and ability to identify targets,” Crosetto told a TV show on Sunday. “In this case, they identified major Italian entrepreneurs, people who, at the request of a minister, would perhaps be ready to make a bank transfer because of their love of Italy.”
The case comes amid a rise in Italy of telephone scams using voices cloned by artificial intelligence. An elderly woman was last week defrauded of €30,000 after receiving a call from someone she believed to be her daughter, who told her that her husband had injured a mother and her child in a car accident and immediately needed the money to pay a lawyer.
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