Associated Incidents
Giorgio Armani and other great Italian billionaire businessmen have been victims of an attempted fraud by a group of scammers who, through Artificial Intelligence, cloned the voice of the Minister of Defense, Guido Crosetto, in order to donate large sums of money intended, supposedly, to free to Italian journalists kidnapped in Iran and Syria. In the calls, they were promised that the money would be returned through the Bank of Italy.
Crosetto himself was responsible for warning of this scam through his social networks, warning his acquaintances that an organized gang was impersonating him. According to the minister, a businessman has paid a "very high" amount.
"These businessmen are people who, out of love for their country, were willing to make a transfer if a minister asked them to. We must sound the alarm, because there are people who continue to fall for it," Crosetto explained on the television channel Rete Quattro. Since the news broke, the list of victims of these scammers has not stopped growing.
Giorgio Armani among those affected
Some of the people who have been contacted by telephone have been Giorgio Armani, Diego Della Valle, owner of Tod's, and the Caltagirone and Beretta families, among many others.
Massimo Moratti, former president of the oil company Saras and the Inter Milan football club, is believed to have been one of the first victims to file a complaint after having sent almost a million euros through international transfers. Moratti was the first person to report the scam to the carabinieri and, according to the Italian media, at least three other businessmen have gone to the police to say that they had been victims of this fraud. "They are good, I mean that everything seemed absolutely true. I know that something like this can happen, but I did not expect it," Moratti explained in the newspaper "La Repubblica".