For example, that they've just closed a deal to buy a startup - a negotiation which was of course conducted in secrecy. It's a startup in another country, which is why we're all out of the office. Timezones are why you've received the request outside of normal working hours. And we've got to, um, close the deal so we can announce it outside of stock market opening hours, for both countries. To close the deal we've got to pay 10% of the 250M purchase price upfront. If you can't get this done within 2 hours the deal will fall through.

Its a company with revenues of a couple of billion and that probably sub contracts thousands of other companies on projects around the world. The finance department is probably sending similar payments regularly.

Most payments will be "secret" in that the amounts won't be made public to employees that don't need to know. The company maybe, for example, be repeating work that has been already been done in house so doesn't want it known inhouse what companies are being paid.

hell i do this if our tester hasn't managed to go over some aspect of our release. That way i get in writing from the product owner that he has OKd it, and if he sends me a teams message i ask him to email me confirmation.

I am not in the finance department, but in software engineering and operations, two-party controls are everywhere. I can't check in code without reviews. I can't access production systems or make changes without approval from another team member. I would think that similar processes could be put into place for transferring tens of millions of dollars.

In other words, there are ways to deal with this that don't come down to "mistrust all technology and revert to face-to-face meetings and handing cash to each other".

That's a false dichotomy. "computer-generated chatter and images" ARE messages sent by humans. There are no cases of computers having agency known to me yet. The root of the problem is humans who lie and mislead. Now they merely have more avenues to do so. In the same vein, you could blame the electronic engineers for allowing people to lie quickly and over vast distances.

I mean - we have authentication for bank accounts, why wouldn't that be demanded for transactions like this? Without proper authentication of the authorities there's no way that a transaction like this should be put through.

I hate discussing deepfakes. I'm one of the original patent holders of automated actor replacement technology. I developed it for personalized advertising, after having been an actor replacement specialist in a bunch of VFX film you probably saw.

I spent from 2002 to '08 creating a VFX pipeline, with global patent protections, and an ethical guidance that included public education on this fundamental new technology. Long story short, I needed financing, went to VCs and angels and they were perfectly winning to fund a porn company, but not what I'd planned: an ethical rollout of a sensitive and very powerful technology with many legs, few realize even today.

By '13 I was bankrupt, burned out, and one of my tech partners, a global leader in facial recognition hired me. That's a different story. Actor replacement technology is a fundamental capability with applications far more important than fraud and pornography. But our civilization is far far too immature to realize any of them.

The bank workers are normally quite understanding - except when it is someone from fraud detection (and yes these are legitimate calls) and they tend to get odly defensive that I wont hand out my personal information.