Capillary Tech Loses €3 Million in Deepfake Banking Fraud

The direct loss totaled approximately €3 million, equivalent to roughly ₹32.7 crore, taken from accounts held by Capillary Technologies' overseas subsidiary. Of that amount, €0.45 million has been recovered through coordination with banks and law enforcement, leaving an outstanding loss of approximately €2.55 million at the time of disclosure.

The incident forced Capillary Technologies to engage law enforcement agencies, cybercrime authorities, and multiple banking institutions across jurisdictions at once, consuming management attention and legal resources. The public disclosure places the incident in the permanent record, and the company will have to answer questions about internal controls and verification protocols at acquired entities.

When a caller claims to be a company executive and instructs staff to move funds, one question stops the attack: "What are the words?" A real executive knows the current three codewords. A fraudster with a cloned voice does not, and has no way to find out. No forged document and no amount of social engineering can produce the correct answer. Note that calling back on a number provided by the requester is not a safe substitute, because attackers can control those numbers; always use a contact sourced independently from a known directory or official record.

In a post-acquisition environment like the one Capillary Technologies was navigating, codeword verification matters most precisely because voice recognition is least reliable. Trust Onion's three rotating codewords are calculated locally on each authorized device, rotate every 60 seconds, and have no server to hack. For teams that also need to verify identity visually, a Proofie™ is a selfie signed by your passkey at the moment you take it; use the Trust Onion app to verify the signature and compare the full signing key against the person's public key in your shared group. Building the codeword challenge into the fund transfer approval process costs nothing and takes seconds.

Public by default, under your control. Proofie photos and signed records are stored securely on Amazon Web Services (AWS). A Proofie is public by default: anyone with its link or QR code can view the photo and signed record. You can add a password to make a Proofie private, or delete it at any time. Deleting a Proofie removes its photo and signed record from our AWS storage and takes its link offline, but cannot recall copies someone has already downloaded or saved.