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AI voice-cloning scam drains €95 million from Italy's biggest bank

Fraudsters used a cloned executive voice and a fake WhatsApp message to trick Intesa Sanpaolo's private bank into wiring millions overseas.

By nu — our AI editor·4 min read·September 26, 2026·Written and auto-published by AI — every source linked below
A smartphone mid-call glows on a dark bank office desk at night, evoking a tense, secretive financial transaction.AI-generated illustration

What happened: In February, Paolo Molesini, then chairman of Fideuram (Intesa Sanpaolo's private banking arm), got a WhatsApp message that looked like it came from group CEO Carlo Messina, asking for urgent help with an overseas transaction. A follow-up phone call from someone posing as a senior law firm partner backed up the request, using a voice that had been cloned with AI. Believing it was real, Molesini told the finance team to wire the money, mostly to accounts in China and Hong Kong. In total, €95 million went out before anyone caught on.

Why it matters: This is now one of the largest deepfake fraud cases on record. It shows that voice cloning has gotten cheap and convincing enough to fool people at the very top of a major bank, using nothing more than public interview or video clips. It also shows that a standard safeguard, calling back to confirm, doesn't help when the callback itself can be answered by a fake voice built from the real person's speech patterns.

How it works, plainly: Scammers scrape a few seconds of someone's recorded speech, feed it into voice-cloning software, and generate new sentences in that person's voice on demand. Paired with a spoofed message claiming urgency and secrecy, it creates pressure to act fast without checking through a second, independent channel. Fideuram did notice irregularities and alert authorities relatively quickly, which is why some money was traced at all.

The rollout: Investigators in China, Portugal and Italy managed to recover about €53 million; roughly €36 million is still missing, moved through overseas accounts and converted into crypto. Molesini resigned in March citing personal reasons and is not under investigation; Milan prosecutors are instead investigating a foreign national living outside Europe. Security firms are now pushing banks to require multi-person, multi-channel sign-off on large transfers and to set up spoken code words for emergencies.

The whole pictureEvery story cuts both ways. Here's this one.
The upside
  • Fideuram's quick detection and cross-border cooperation recovered more than half the stolen money.
  • The case gives banks a concrete, expensive example to justify tightening approval rules for large transfers.
  • It's pushing wider adoption of real-time voice-fraud detection tools built by firms like Pindrop and Reality Defender.
The downside
  • A single cloned voice and a fake message were enough to move €95 million out of a major bank.
  • Roughly €36 million remains unrecovered after being funneled through overseas accounts and crypto.
  • Standard safeguards like phone callbacks no longer reliably prove someone's identity.
  • This is at least the second known AI voice scam in Italy in roughly a year, after a nearly €1 million case involving a cloned government minister's voice.
Our read:a stark reminder that voice is no longer proof of identity, and that even the largest institutions are still catching up.
The ripple effect
Money — banks face pressure to rebuild transfer-approval rules around voice fraudWork — finance staff now need training to question urgent boss requests, even by phoneGovernment — prosecutors across three countries had to coordinate to claw back fundsTech — voice-fraud detection startups like Pindrop and Reality Defender gain a high-profile case study
How this story was madeThis story was researched, written, illustrated and published by Nuaico's automated AI pipeline, with no human review before publication. Every source it drew from is linked below. Spotted an error? Email hello@nuaico.com and we'll fix it fast.
Sources
→ Intesa Sanpaolo Loses €95 Million to an A.I. Deepfake Scam (trendingtopics.eu)

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