Ralph Dangelmaier : How Deepfake Avatars Turn Payments Into an Attack Surface and How AI Agents Can Stop Them
Payments have always been a high-value target for cybercriminals, but artificial intelligence is changing the nature of the threat. In the past, attackers often needed stolen passwords, card details, or compromised accounts to move money. Today, generative AI can help create convincing faces, voices, videos, and conversations that make a fraudulent payment request appear to come from a trusted person. The result is a new kind of attack where the technology does not necessarily break the payment system itself. Instead, it manipulates the people and systems responsible for deciding whether a payment should happen. Deepfake avatars make this problem even more complicated because visual and audio cues that once helped establish trust can now be manufactured at scale. At the same time, AI agents are beginning to participate in commerce, authorization, fraud detection, and other financial workflows. Research into agentic commerce highlights risks around transaction authorization, agent ident...