Deepfakes and the Rising Cost of Trust
I’ve been struck by the story of Arup, the British engineering firm behind London’s Crossrail and the Sydney Opera House, losing the equivalent of £20 million to a deepfake scam. This happened in May 2024, but I have only just heard about it.
As I was told it, the Chief Financial Officer was called at night and told he would be asked to transfer £20 million the next day, and that there would be an online board meeting to approve it. The board meeting happened, with all the senior executives – and there was a vote, which convinced him to make the transfer. But apparently, the board meeting wasn’t real. The people he saw were deepfakes: AI-generated images and voices superimposed over real people, so that they looked and sounded exactly like his colleagues, and responded in a human way. He made the transfer. The money was gone. £20 million.
If a company of that scale, with all its systems and safeguards, can be tricked… what does that say about the rest of us?
For me, this story isn’t only about fraud. It’s about how quickly the ground under “trust” is shifting. We used to feel safe when we heard a familiar voice or saw a colleague’s face on screen. Now, even that is open to manipulation.
It makes me think about the work we do in therapy. Trust is our currency too. Without it, nothing can happen. And yet, like Arup, our clients often come in already bruised by deception—whether by partners, parents, systems, or themselves. What we offer is a space where reality can be tested, where “Is this real?” can be asked without judgement. This makes trust in the therapy room even more important than before.
Maybe the lesson here is twofold:
• In the outside world, we need scepticism as standard—layers of verification, and permission to pause and question.
• In the inner world, we need the opposite: somewhere scepticism can rest, and people can risk showing their real face and voice, without fear of being tricked or shamed.
Deepfakes are eroding our confidence in what’s real out there. All the more reason that in here – in the therapy room, in our human connections – we practise another kind of reality check. Not through code or credentials, but through eye contact, breath, tone, presence.
Because while technology can fake a face, it can’t fake attunement.
And that—thankfully—remains the most trustworthy thing we have.
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