Operator Vodafone announced a strategic partnership with technology company Synhawk, aiming to counter the increasing number of frauds based on the misuse of artificial intelligence. As one of the first operators in Europe, it will deploy systems for real-time deepfake detection, both at the level of end-user devices and, in the future, directly within the mobile network.
The collaboration responds to a new wave of cybercrime, where attackers use generative AI to credibly mimic the voices of managers or synthetically alter video recordings during conference calls. A recent example of the severity of these threats is the case of the British company Arup, which lost 25 million dollars to an attack using deepfake technology. The project is being developed in line with the new European Artificial Intelligence Act (AI Act) and the NIS2 directive.
The technology, developed by researcher Maty Boháček from Stanford University, will be deployed in three progressive phases:
Vodafone Verify: A mobile application for Android and iOS that will be available to all customers from this autumn. It will allow users to verify the integrity of voice messages from platforms like WhatsApp, photos, and videos directly on their device.
Vodafone Verify Meetings: A service for companies and institutions, to be launched next year. It uses a cloud AI agent to monitor video conferences and detect potential synthetic participants.
Vodafone Verify Network: An advanced solution at the network layer level, which in the future will automatically detect synthetically altered voices directly during a phone call and warn the recipient.
“Generative artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the economics of fraud. Attacks are now cheap and easily scalable. Our responsibility is to change the economics of defense in the same way and bring deepfake content detection to the customer,” stated Violeta Luca, CEO of Vodafone in the Czech Republic.
According to Lukáš Foral, CEO of Synhawk, protecting the authenticity of human communication is becoming an entirely new category of digital security. Vodafone is working closely with the Czech Telecommunication Office on developing standards with the ambition to define future norms for trustworthy communication in the AI era.