Dissected: How scammers built a fake Zoom call from real videos of PM Wong and other Singapore leaders
For the Zoom scam, audio from that real interview was replaced with fake or manipulated speech, but the video of Ms Indranee herself – including her hand gestures and head movements – appeared unedited.
Subsequent analysis confirmed that at least seven visual segments in the Zoom scam were extracted from YouTube videos that are still publicly accessible. These videos are either dated or have low view counts.
Among these was footage of Mr Tharman in a virtual panel, hosted by the Centre for Economic Policy Research and uploaded in November 2020 – three years before he became president.
The original video of Mr Tharman’s panel had fewer than 200 views, as of August 2026. The clip of Ms Indranee’s interview on Money FM 89.3 had just over 350 views.
While the video that contained Mr Wong’s COVID-19 announcement had around 30,000 views, the specific sequence used by the scammers starts at around the 41-minute mark of the hour-long video – making it hard for casual viewers to pinpoint its origin.
Associate Professor Hannah Yee-Fen Lim, AI governance lead at the Nanyang Technological University (NTU)’s Global Institute of Finance, Technology and Society, said the little-watched nature of the source videos meant victims were less likely to have seen them – which in turn could have reduced the suspicion that they were fake.
She added that it was also much cheaper and easier to use publicly available footage than to generate the likeness of a person using AI.
FAKE AUDIO, FAKE BRANDING
The scammers took several steps to prevent elements in the real footage from giving them away, particularly logos identifying their original publishers.
For instance, the original footage of Ms Indranee and Mr Wong bore the watermarks of Money FM 89.3 and The Straits Times respectively, where the footage was sourced. In both cases, the watermarks were positioned in the top-right corner of the frame.
To mask these, the scammers overlaid the logos with a “Live Zoom Recording” graphic. This tactic likely went unnoticed by the victim, but authentic Zoom calls do not contain such logos inside individual participant screens. Instead, Zoom displays recording indicators on the wider meeting and app interface.