MPs’ extortion plot: Deepfakes in letters were low-quality and black-and-white, says lawmaker

“ROGUE STATES” COLLUDING WITH CRIMINAL GANGS?

Experts told CNA that the perpetrators likely chose to use physical mail due to a lack of traceability and a higher likelihood of victims actually reading.

“Just about everything can be traced and tracked online or when our mobile phones are used,” said Associate Professor Hannah Yee-Fen Lim from Nanyang Technological University.

“Snail mail makes it harder to trace, especially if they wear gloves and leave no fingerprints, and post it in a street letterbox using very normal-looking envelopes which street CCTVs cannot capture or distinguish.”

The law and computer science expert added that most people who don’t look at the photos carefully would not easily identify the deepfakes.

This is especially so with “the speed at which people seem to be happily forwarding messages on social media”, she added.

Mr Benjamin Ang, who heads the Centre of Excellence for National Security at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies think-tank, pointed out that physical letters can avoid spam filters in email systems.

Victims are also more likely to take letters seriously and open them, compared to emails which they may delete without even reading, he said.

While it remains unclear who’s behind the plot, the demand for money seems to indicate that they are criminals motivated by profit, said Mr Ang, who is also head of Digital Impact Research at the school.

He added that “there are also known cases where rogue states collaborate with cyber criminal gangs” in such ruses.

The Jurong MP Dr Tan, one of the victims and also a member of the Government Parliamentary Committee for Home Affairs and Law, wrote on Facebook post on Saturday that he did not want to conjecture the identity of the “ringleaders” or whether they were based in Singapore or overseas.

“I’d rather not speculate on why this is happening now, at a very important time in Singapore’s history,” he said. “But let me say this: We are not afraid. And we will not let anyone intimidate us or deter us from doing our duty.”