The former president of Fideuram Paolo Molesini was the victim of a 36 million euro scam triggered by a fake WhatsApp message from the apparent Intesa banker Carlo Messina, with the help of a voice created with artificial intelligence.
Corriere della Sera reports this, explaining that the affair could have had worse consequences as a good part of the approximately 95 million that came out of the institute's coffers was recovered abroad (either on its own or with the Milan prosecutor's office).
The international scam dates back to last February when Molesini, then president of Fideuram (a subsidiary of Intesa) received - in reality he believed he was receiving, as he realized shortly after - a WhatsApp message from Carlo Messina, director of the parent company Banca Intesa. In the communication, the apparent Messina indicates to him the urgency of operating a series of bank transfers through Fideuram's treasury (due to some practical reasons that would prevent Intesa from doing them alone) aimed at not losing the opportunity for a financial operation that is of interest to Intesa.
The gang then simulates another coherent communication to the president of Fideuram: this time the one calling him (or, rather, appearing to call him) is a lawyer from an important international firm, Paolo Nastasi, managing partner of A&O Shearman Italia, completely unfamiliar and unaware and used in the scam as an intermediary in the operation supported by the fake Messina. He is a business lawyer that Moresini knows, and if the voice sounds exactly like that to him it is because the scammers have artfully replicated it with artificial intelligence tools.
This is how bank transfers start, especially to China and Hong Kong. However, the alarm was raised and Fideuram activated the international interbank collaboration systems which allowed the recovery of a large part of the loot. At least 36 million are missing from the appeal, which evaporated in the conversion into cryptocurrencies which investigators are now trying to track down with letters rogatory all over the world before the scammers manage to monetize them.
In the investigation by the Milan Prosecutor's Office into the alleged scam there is at least one name registered in the register of suspects for months, a foreign name which could also refer to a fictitious identity. The execution of the preventive seizure decree, in which the name of a foreign person is indicated and signed by investigating judge Sonia Mancini, dates back to last May and allowed 13 million to be frozen in a bank in Portugal, while in China over 40 million had already been blocked because Fideuram, an institution of the Banca Intesa group, had immediately taken action.
The remaining money - that 95 million had been cleared with multiple operations towards China and also in Portugal - instead bounced from that Portuguese bank and transformed into bitcoin, before the investigators, also through international collaboration with multiple letters rogatory, managed to intervene. In the meantime, the Prosecutor's Office with the deputy Eugenio Fusco and the prosecutors Barbara Benzi and Alfonso Serritiello, again through international rogotaria activities, are hunting down the gang who allegedly carried out the scam. For now only that name is indicated in the documents, probably referring to the movements of the money.
'CEO Fraud' is a rapidly growing phenomenon also thanks to AI
'CEO Fraud' represent a phenomenon that has recently become widespread, not only in the banking sector. According to the Association for Financial Professionals (Afp) survey for 2025, 74% of organizations say they have been the target of CEO Fraud/Bec attempts (or successful attacks). This is an increase compared to 63% the previous year.
The most recent reports (Afp and Enisa) also highlight an increase in the use of artificial intelligence for drafting emails without grammatical errors and audio/video deepfake technologies to impersonate the voice or image of the CEO during company calls or video conferences. Recently, the Autonomous Federation of Italian Bankers (Fabi), reprocessing the data of the Postal Police, raised the alarm: from 2022 to 2025 the number of cases grew, but at a rate significantly lower than that of the sums stolen by criminals.
In 2025 the stolen sums reached 269 million euros, with an increase of 17.4% in just one year. An increase that confirms a particularly negative trend and, as anticipated, without setbacks: from 2022 to 2025, the economic value of digital fraud grew by over 116 million euros, going from 152.9 million to 269 million, or a leap of 75.9% in four years.
Overall, over the four years, over 828 million euros were stolen through online scams and computer fraud. In the affair which saw the former president of Fideuram Paolo Molesini as the victim, most of the damage has been recovered and, for the remaining portion, further activities are underway aimed at recovering the sums. Furthermore, the bank's IT systems were not hacked.
In recent days, Antonio De Vita, chief security office of Intesa Sanpaolo, during the plenary session of the WeSec Security Exhibition organized by the ABI, addressed the topic of artificial intelligence, with Intesa Sanpaolo having "culled around 5,000 fake videos made with AI, of which the majority of which are linked to our CEO Carlo Messina" since the beginning of the year.
