How AI Has Rewritten the Threat to Executives and their Families
- Team Payton
- 3 days ago
- 12 min read
The Call That Sounds Like Your Daughter
How AI Has Rewritten the Threat to UHNW Families
Voice cloning, deepfake video calls, and a projected $40 billion fraud problem — and the calm, practical playbook every family, family office, and advisor should have in place.
By Theresa Payton, Founder & CEO of Fortalice Solutions, and former White House Chief Information Officer with inputs from the Digital Executive Protection team at Fortalice Solutions.
Top Trends in Ultra High Net Worth Family Office Protection
In more than two decades of protecting ultra-high-net-worth families and the businesses behind their wealth, I've watched the nature of this threat change more in the last three years than in the previous twenty.
Here's the version I now tell every family I sit down with:
The biggest risk to your fortune this year probably isn't a market correction. It's a phone call that sounds exactly like your daughter's voice, asking for bail money she never needed. It's the caller who claims to be a federal agent, telling you to wire a fine right now or face arrest. It's a video call with your family office's controller, the CFO, and two board members — where every face except the controller's is a synthetic AI construction.
None of that is speculative. All of it has already happened to real families and real companies. And through no fault of your own, the raw material for these attacks — your voice, your face, your family's routines — is already sitting in public view.
Why “Don't Click the Link” No Longer Applies
For years, the standard advice was simple: don't click suspicious links, don't open strange attachments. That advice still matters, but it no longer covers the most dangerous scenario families face today, because the newest attacks don't use a link at all. They use a voice.
Modern voice-cloning tools need as little as three seconds of audio to produce a convincing replica of someone's speech — enough to fool a parent, a spouse, or a trusted assistant. Three seconds is nothing to find. It's in a podcast interview, a toast at a gala, a birthday video posted to social media, a keynote at a charity dinner. For families whose members are, by definition, prominent — through business, philanthropy, or simply a large public footprint — that three seconds of audio was probably already public before anyone thought to protect it.
This is the uncomfortable truth I want families to sit with, not to frighten them, but so they can act from clarity instead of panic: wealth and managed privacy used to go together, and now, the lack of privacy is the very thing criminals exploit.
What the Data Actually Shows
There is a lot of noise in this space such as sensational headlines and “billion-dollar deepfake” statistics that don't hold up to scrutiny. I'd rather give you fewer numbers you can trust than a wall of numbers you can't.
What we know | Figure | Source |
Increase in data-theft extortion targeting VIPs and high-net-worth individuals | 25% | Fortune, via Fortalice client data |
Audited 2025 U.S. losses tied to AI-related fraud complaints | $893.3 million | FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) — the only fully audited government figure in this space |
Projected annual AI-enabled fraud losses in the U.S. by 2027 (up from $12.3B in 2023) | $40 billion | Deloitte Center for Financial Services |
Average human accuracy at spotting a high-quality deepfake — essentially a coin flip | ~55% | Peer-reviewed meta-analysis and industry testing |
Audio needed to convincingly clone a voice | 3 seconds | FBI public service advisory |
A note on rigor, because I think it matters: many of the eye-popping “billion-dollar deepfake” figures circulating in the media lack a verifiable methodology. The numbers above are the most rigorously sourced available as of August 2026, and I'd encourage you to treat any statistic that doesn't cite its methodology with the same skepticism.
And this is not a uniquely American problem. Law enforcement and fraud-reporting bodies across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific have independently flagged AI-enabled impersonation as one of the fastest-growing categories of financial crime they track, for the same underlying reason: cheap, accessible voice-cloning tools paired with a global population of families and executives whose lives are already documented online. Wherever wealth and public visibility intersect, the exposure looks the same, regardless of border.
Why Wealthy Families Have Become the Preferred Target
Top Trends in Ultra High Net Worth Family Office Protection
For years, conventional wisdom held that cybercriminals go after large corporations because that's where the money is. That calculus has changed, and it's worth understanding exactly why, because the reasons are structural. Also please note, none of this is a reflection of anything a family did wrong.
• Your public life is the attacker's research file. Names, faces, voices, and family relationships are already documented across LinkedIn, press coverage, philanthropic events, and even a child's sports team photos. What used to be a nice public profile is now a training set.
• Home and family office security rarely matches corporate security. A family office may oversee more capital than many mid-sized companies, yet its home networks, personal devices, and household staff typically operate with a fraction of the security budget, monitoring, and protocol of a Fortune 500 enterprise.
• Discretion, quietly, works against you. High-net-worth individuals are statistically more likely to pay an extortion demand privately than to involve law enforcement, which is understandable — but it also makes them repeat targets, because word travels among criminal networks about who pays and who doesn't.
• Every household member is a potential entry point. A family office typically spans multiple generations, multiple residences, and a staff that includes executive assistants, estate managers, and household employees. Attackers don't need to fool the principal directly; they only need to find the one person in that network who hasn't been briefed.
Two Cases Worth Knowing
The video call that wasn't real. A finance employee at a multinational engineering firm joined what appeared to be a routine video call with several colleagues, including the CFO. Every other person on that call was an AI-generated deepfake. Nothing about the meeting looked unusual in the moment. The employee wired $25.6 million before anyone realized what had happened.
The daughter who was never in danger. A mother in Florida received a call in what sounded exactly like her daughter's voice — panicked, saying she'd been in a serious accident. A second “caller,” posing as an attorney, followed up demanding immediate bail money. The mother wired $15,000 before learning her daughter had been safe at home the entire time. The voice had been cloned from a few seconds of audio that was already public.
Neither of these families or employees did anything careless. Both were targeted precisely because the information a criminal needed was already available, and the emotional pressure was engineered to prevent the one thing that would have stopped it: a pause.
What Actually Protects a Family
I want to leave you with confidence, not just concern, because these attacks, sophisticated as they are, are beatable with the right habits and the right team behind you.
• Establish a family verification phrase. Agree on a private code word or question, known only within the family and trusted staff, used to confirm identity on any urgent financial or emergency request. Always verify through a separate channel — call back on a number you already have saved, not the number that called you.
• Reduce your digital footprint before a crisis, not after. Have your personal data scrubbed from data broker sites, lock down home networks and smart devices, and periodically audit what's publicly searchable about you and your family. This is prevention, not damage control, and it's far more effective when done proactively.
• Treat urgency as a warning sign, not a reason to act fast. Genuine emergencies almost never require an instant, unverifiable wire transfer. If a request is engineered to make you feel you have no time to think, that pressure is itself the tell.
• Pair technology with trained human judgment. Deepfake detection tools are genuinely useful, but a trained analyst who knows a family's real patterns, voice, and behavioral baseline will catch what software alone misses.
• Protect the whole household, not just the principal. Spouses, adult children, executive assistants, and household staff are frequently the actual point of entry. A protection plan that covers only the named principal leaves the door open everywhere else.
A Word for the People Around the Family
Protecting a family's wealth has always required a team and today that team's job description has quietly expanded.
For family offices and office managers: the operational protocols you already have for wire approvals, vendor payments, and staff onboarding need a second layer built specifically for AI-enabled impersonation. A callback verification step and a mandatory cooling-off period on unusual requests cost almost nothing to implement and close the exact gap these attacks exploit.
For estate attorneys and trustees: you are frequently the “voice of authority” criminals choose to impersonate, precisely because a call that appears to come from counsel carries built-in urgency and trust. It's worth having an explicit conversation with clients about how your office will — and will never — request funds to move.
For CPAs and financial advisors: multi-factor authentication using hardware keys or authenticator apps, not SMS, should be standard across every client-facing portal. Regular digital footprint audits and standardized verification workflows for any movement of money are no longer “nice to have.”
For executives and executive assistants: you sit at the intersection of a family's public calendar and its private financial life, which makes you a high-value target in your own right. The same verification habits that protect the principal need to protect you, too.
The Bigger Shift
Security professionals for decades used to tell people: don't click the link. Now there is no link, there's a call that can sound exactly like your own child, CEO, CFO or someone else in your circle of trust.
Wealth used to help you buy privacy. Today, privacy is what you actively use to protect wealth. That's not a comfortable reframe, but it's an honest one, and families who accept it early are the ones who stay ahead of this.
My goal isn't to make anyone afraid of technology. It's to make sure the people you love are never the easiest target in the room.
If You'd Like a Second Set of Eyes
If reading this raised a question about your own family's exposure, a staff member you're not sure has been briefed, a public profile that feels bigger than it should, a wire approval process that hasn't been updated in years, that's a completely normal reaction, and it's exactly the kind of conversation worth having before there's a problem, not after.
Fortalice Solutions built our Digital Executive Protection practice for exactly this: a discreet, integrated program covering digital footprint reduction, home and device security, family verification protocols, and trained human monitoring, built around your family's actual life and your busy work life, not a generic checklist.
It sits alongside our broader work in penetration testing, blue team defense, and AI risk assessment, for families and the businesses and family offices behind them who want one team that understands both sides of the problem.
There's no obligation in reaching out, and no pressure, just a conversation with people who have spent two decades doing exactly this work.
Theresa Payton is the Founder and CEO of Fortalice Solutions and the first female Chief Information Officer at the White House. She is a bestselling author, a globally recognized AI Strategist and digital trust and protection expert, and a frequent advisor to ultra-high-net-worth families, family offices, and Fortune 500 boards on AI risk, digital executive protection, and cyber defense.
Frequently Asked Questions
The questions below are the ones that UHNW families, advisors, and family office staff ask us most often.
We've kept the answers direct and hope you can put them to good use.
1. Threat Landscape & AI Risk
How do cybercriminals target high-net-worth families differently than corporate enterprises?
While corporate cyberattacks focus on breaching large databases, attacks on high-net-worth (HNW) and ultra-high-net-worth (UHNW) families are deeply personal, quiet, and hyper-targeted. Attackers recognize that modern enterprises spend millions hardening their corporate perimeters. As a result, threat actors have shifted focus to softer, less-monitored gaps: the executive's personal life, home network, and family office infrastructure.
UHNW families face unique vulnerabilities:
Asymmetric Security Defenses: Private residences, smart home devices, and personal Wi-Fi networks rarely operate with enterprise-grade monitoring, despite overseeing comparable wealth.
Public Human Attack Surfaces: Spouses, adult children, domestic staff, and executive assistants are frequently targeted through social engineering, as their digital footprints are often easier to trace.
Extortion Preference: HNW individuals are statistically more inclined to settle extortion demands quietly to preserve privacy and prevent public reputation damage.
How Fortalice Secures Your Family: Generic IT tools are built for corporate offices and end at your front door. At Fortalice Solutions, led by former White House CIO Theresa Payton, our team provides discreet, specialized Digital Executive Protection. We bridge the gap between corporate security and personal privacy, removing digital exposure points before attackers can exploit them.
Why are wealthy families and family offices targeted more than large corporations?
Corporations have hardened their security over the last decade, pushing criminals toward softer targets. Family offices frequently manage very large sums of capital while running on consumer-grade IT infrastructure, with home networks, personal devices, and decentralized staff that don't have the security budget or oversight of a Fortune 500 company. Combined with families' understandable preference for discretion over public reporting, this makes them a higher-reward, lower-resistance target.
How does AI voice cloning work in a scam?
A criminal collects a short public audio sample of someone's voice—from an interview, a speech, a podcast, or a social media video—and feeds it into a voice-synthesis tool. Current tools need as little as three seconds of audio to produce a convincing clone. The cloned voice is then used in a phone call, often paired with a fabricated emergency, to pressure a family member, executive assistant, or employee into moving money or sharing sensitive information before they have time to verify what's actually happening.
Is deepfake technology good enough to fool people in real time, on a live call?
Yes. In one widely reported case, a finance employee at a multinational firm joined a live video call with what appeared to be several real colleagues, including the CFO—every other participant was an AI-generated deepfake, and nothing about the call seemed unusual. The employee wired $25.6 million before the fraud was discovered. Independent testing shows people correctly identify high-quality deepfakes only about 55% of the time—close to a coin flip—which is why verification protocols matter more than relying on the ability to "just tell" if something is fake.
Does this only affect the wealthy family member, or does it put staff and family members at risk too?
It affects everyone around the principal. Spouses, adult children, executive assistants, and household staff are frequently the actual point of entry criminals use, precisely because they may have financial authority or access without the same level of security awareness or protection as the principal. An effective protection plan covers the whole household and staff, not just the named individual.
2. Actionable Defense & Family Protocols
What is Digital Executive Protection?
Digital Executive Protection (DEP) is a specialized cybersecurity discipline focused on securing the personal lives, home networks, mobile devices, and digital footprints of high-net-worth individuals, executives, and their families. Unlike traditional corporate IT security, it addresses the vulnerabilities that live outside the office: personal email accounts, smart home devices, publicly available data about family members, and the household staff who have access to a family's daily life and finances.
What is the single most effective habit a family can adopt right now?
Treat urgency as a red flag rather than a reason to act quickly. Legitimate emergencies almost never require an instant, unverifiable wire transfer or a decision made in the next five minutes. Building in a mandatory pause—and a callback on a known number—for any high-pressure financial request neutralizes the tactic nearly every version of this scam depends on.
How can a family or family office verify a request is legitimate before wiring money?
Set up an out-of-band verification protocol:
Establish a private code word or backup question known only to family members and authorized staff.
Institute a strict rule that no wire transfer is ever approved based on a phone call or email alone.
Perform a mandatory callback to a phone number you already have on file—never the number that contacted you—before any funds move.
This single habit stops the vast majority of impersonation-based fraud attempts.
How can a family office protect wire transfers and financial transactions from cyber fraud?
Wire transfer fraud and invoice manipulation remain the most financially damaging cybercrimes targeting family offices. Attackers often gain silent access to a trustee's, attorney's, or assistant's email months in advance, studying communication patterns before inserting fraudulent routing instructions into a legitimate transaction.
Key controls every family office must implement:
Dual-Control Authorization: Require two independent human approvals for any fund movement exceeding a set threshold.
Out-of-Band Callbacks: Mandate verbal verification via a trusted, pre-established phone number before executing wire changes—never reply to the email request directly.
Email Domain Hardening: Deploy strict email security protocols (DMARC, DKIM, SPF) and hardware-based multi-factor authentication (MFA) across all family office and personal email accounts.
What should CPAs, wealth managers, and estate attorneys do to protect UHNW clients?
Require hardware security keys or authenticator apps rather than SMS-based multi-factor authentication on every client-facing portal, conduct periodic digital footprint audits to see what personal client data is exposed online, and standardize a verification workflow for any request to move money—one that cannot be bypassed by a voice or video that "sounds right" in the moment.
How Fortalice Secures Your Ecosystem: Fortalice Solutions regularly acts as a trusted cyber advisor to the world's top-tier law firms, UHNW and multi-family offices, and wealth management firns. We provide third-party risk assessments, encrypted communication channels, and co-counsel cyber support to ensure that your client's complete professional ecosystem remains secure.
3. Leadership & Expertise
Who is Theresa Payton?
Theresa Payton is the Founder and CEO of Fortalice Solutions and the first woman to serve as Chief Information Officer at the White House. She is a bestselling author and a globally recognized cybersecurity expert who advises ultra-high-net-worth families, family offices, and corporate boards on AI risk, digital executive protection, and cyber defense.
What does Fortalice Solutions do for wealthy families and family offices?
Fortalice Solutions provides discreet, integrated Digital Executive Protection for UHNW families and family offices, including digital footprint reduction, home network and device security, family verification protocols, and trained human monitoring that works alongside AI-based detection tools. Fortalice also provides penetration testing, blue team defense, and AI risk assessments for the businesses and family offices connected to these families.
Protect Your Legacy Today
Securing your family’s digital life does not mean living in fear of modern technology—it means adopting airtight habits and having an expert team in your corner.
Learn more about custom Digital Executive Protection at Fortalice Solutions.
How can I get in touch with Fortalice Solutions about protecting my family?
You can learn more about Fortalice's Digital Executive Protection services at fortalicesolutions.com or email Watchmen@Fortalicesolutions.com. Their office number is 877.487.8160.
Contact Fortalice for a free 20 minute confidential consultation.
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