I don’t care how good your IT team is.
I don’t care how many training sessions you’ve run on phishing emails.
The game has changed, and most businesses haven’t noticed yet.
The £19 Million Wake-Up Call
Arup, a sophisticated UK engineering firm, lost £19 million to a deepfake scam. Their employee joined a video call with senior management. Saw their faces. Heard their voices. Followed instructions.
Except none of those people were real.
If a firm of that calibre can be fooled, your business is vulnerable. Full stop.
The Numbers Nobody Wants to Face
Here’s what I’ve been tracking:
Deepfake fraud hit £154 million in Q1 2025 alone. That’s one quarter. Forecasts predict £31 billion by 2027.
The UK recorded 118,000 identity fraud cases in the first six months of 2025.
Your traditional verification systems? Criminals are bypassing them at scale.
You Can’t Trust Your Own Eyes Anymore
Humans correctly identify high-quality deepfake videos only 24.5% of the time.
Read that again.
You’re worse than a coin flip at spotting fakes. Your finance manager is worse. Your CEO is worse.
The video call verification you rely on? Worthless without additional authentication protocols.
What I’m Telling Business Owners Right Now
Stop treating this as an IT problem. This is a business continuity crisis.
The average deepfake attack costs businesses nearly £385,000. Large enterprises lose £525,000 per incident. But those are just averages. The real damage comes from the attacks that succeed because you thought your current systems were enough.
I work with business owners to identify what’s leaking value. Right now, AI-enabled fraud is the leak most businesses haven’t even acknowledged exists.
You need multi-layered verification strategies. You need protocols that assume video and voice can be faked. You need to train your team to question what they see and hear.
The Uncomfortable Truth
Your competitors are either already strengthening their defences or they’re about to learn an expensive lesson.
Which category are you in?
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