With every passing day, the techniques and technologies used by legal fraudsters are becoming increasingly sophisticated and convincing. In particular, deepfakes are becoming a significant threat, with fraudsters using these advanced technologies to commit identity theft against law firms and their clients.
It is imperative that law firms remain well informed and astute when it comes to fraud. Fraud is not only financially motivated: data is increasingly becoming a target. With continuous technological advancement, it is becoming increasingly challenging to detect fraudulent legal activity. Read on for everything you need to know about modern legal fraud, the rise of deepfakes, and how we can protect your law firm.
What is Legal Fraud?
Fraud is any wrongful or criminal deception that is devised and intended to result in some form of financial or personal gain. This becomes a crime when the deception causes someone to act to their own detriment. This can include anything from credit card theft and employment scams to phishing and money laundering.
The types of fraud that impact law firms and their clients usually involve insurance fraud, forgery, embezzlement and, crucially, identity theft.
What is a Deepfake?
Deepfake technology uses artificial intelligence (AI) to create fake yet highly realistic and convincing images, videos, and audio of anything you can imagine. In this context, the technology is used to create convincing forgeries of a person’s likeness. In a legal context, deepfake technology can be used to create false and damaging content about law firms, their lawyers, and their clients.
Deepfakes that target law firms or their lawyers can depict their involvement in illegal activity or represent them making fabricated statements that are inflammatory and, often, defamatory. Meanwhile, deepfakes that target a law firm’s clients will imitate the likeness of a lawyer or client to be used in video calls and other digital interactions to create outcomes that benefit the fraudster but are detrimental to the client.
The Implications of Deepfakes
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) has issued an urgent warning to lawyers about the risks posed by deepfake technology, especially in the context of using video calls for client identification.
Unfortunately, deepfake technology has successfully defrauding a number of companies out of extortionate sums of money. Most notably, a British engineering company became victim to a deepfake attack in early 2024, costing the company approximately £20 million. As the number and sophistication of these attacks continues to sharply increase, law firms and their clients are highly likely to encounter deepfaking due to the sensitive and high-value information being handled.
Is your IT provider your weakest link?
One of the fastest growing methods of attack on businesses is for cybercriminals to contact IT companies using deepfake technology to pretend to be one of their clients. They then ask for security changes or passwords to gain access to the clients systems.
IT companies should therefore be using secondary verification of any security requested they receive by phone, email or portals in order to keep clients safe. As a law firm you will likely be verifying requests from your clients – make sure you IT company do the same for you.
Find our more about this type of attack in our recent blog article.
How Pro Drive IT Can Help
From document management to case research, the legal industry is heavily reliant on technology. Whether you’re a small or large law firm, it’s critical that any highly sensitive client data is protected and that your IT continues performing optimally. That’s why we offer specialised IT support for law firms across the UK.
From software upgrades and remote access to cyber security and fraud protection, our IT professionals understand the unique challenges law firms face and have the expertise and resources to take them on.
