Deepfake & AI Fraud: A Growing Cyber Risk for Canadian Businesses and Employees

How AI and Deepfakes are Changing Cyber Risk for Canadian Businesses

Traditional phishing relied on typos, generic scripts and stolen credentials, the kind of red flags employees are trained to catch. Generative AI removes most of those tells, making it harder for your employees to tell the difference. 

Microsoft’s 2025 Digital Defense Report found AI-generated phishing emails get a 54% click-through rate, compared with 12% for standard attempts. 

Voice cloning has made the problem worse. Modern AI models need as little as 10 seconds of someone’s voice, pulled from a podcast, an earnings call or a social clip, to generate a convincing replica. 

Common AI-Driven Fraud Businesses Should Watch For

AI-driven fraud generally falls into a few recognizable patterns: 

Voice and Video Impersonation 

Criminals use cloned voices and faces to impersonate an executive or trusted vendor during a live call or video meeting, often timed around a payment approval or an urgent request.  

AI-written Business Email Compromise 

Classic BEC relied on generic scripts. AI-written BEC studies a target’s past emails to copy their tone and phrasing, making a fraudulent payment request or an urgent data ask look like it came from the real person. 

Synthetic Identity Fraud 

Criminals also combine real stolen data, like a Social Insurance Number, with fabricated details to build an entirely fake identity. These synthetic profiles can pass basic checks and open fraudulent accounts or slip through onboarding as a fake vendor or contractor. AI and deepfakes are now cited by 64% of fraud executives as a top identity fraud concern, according to a 2026 report from Datos Insights and Mitek. 

The Hidden Costs of Deepfake and AI-Driven Fraud

The financial hit is rarely the whole story. Businesses also face: 

• Direct losses: funds sent to a criminal account, often gone before anyone notices. 
• Investigation and response costs: specialists brought in to trace what happened and close the gap. 
• Reputational fallout: a convincing deepfake of an executive can shake client trust before a company has time to respond. 
• Legal exposure: regulators are starting to expect businesses to show they’ve accounted for known AI risks. 

Fabricated executive videos have already been used to spread false statements about a company, from a claimed factory fire to a bogus bankruptcy announcement, moving a stock price before the real story catches up. 

The dollar figures are significant. Canadian spear-phishing losses reported to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre reached $67.3 million in 2024 alone. For the first time last year, FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center tracked AI as a distinct fraud category, logging $893 million in AI-linked losses in a single year. Deepfake-specific fraud losses in North America topped $200 million in the first quarter of 2025 alone and the pace has only picked up since. 

How Modern Cyber Insurance Protects Canadian Businesses from Deepfake and AI Fraud

BOXX continuously updates its products and services to keep pace with how modern cyber threats and tactics evolve. BOXX now specifically covers AI and deepfake related events within every Cyberboxx® Business policy, closing what had been a grey area in many cyber insurance policies. 

The update is much more than simply adding a coverage line. Cyberboxx® Business combines insurance with always-on Cyberboxx® Assist preventive cyber security services, built to help a business predict, prevent, respond to and recover from cyber incidents. 

The new endorsement is paired with BOXX’s First Party Each and Every Loss structure, which reinstates the policy’s limit after each covered incident so businesses have protection for their full policy period. That matters because AI advancements can create completely unique and separate breaches across a policy term. 

Depending on the policy, first-party coverage can include: 

• Incident response and data recovery 
• Lost income following a covered business interruption 
• Social engineering and AI or deepfake-driven fraud 
• Cyber extortion and ransomware expenses

Coverage can also respond to claims from people harmed by the incident, including privacy and network security liability and regulatory defence costs. 

Cyberboxx® Assist services help businesses and their employees predict and prevent cyber vulnerabilities before it’s used against them. 

Continuous attack surface scanning flags vulnerabilities across a company’s public-facing digital assets, while BOXX monitors the dark web for exposed credentials – “seeing what hackers see” – so a business is alerted quickly to take action. 

The Hackbusters® breach response team is available 24/7 with real human support. More than 80% of Hackbusters® cases are resolved without a claim, helping businesses prevent many incidents before they become larger financial losses. For ongoing security strategy, a virtual Chief Information Security Officer gives businesses expert security guidance without the cost of a full-time hire. 

Best Practices that Help Employees and Business Owners Prevent AI and Deepfake Fraud

Deepfakes are convincing, but not perfect. A few technical tells still give them away. Voice clones can sound close to real but often carry a slightly flat or robotic cadence in longer sentences, especially under pressure. Video deepfakes tend to be more visible: they often blur or distort around glasses because of how light reflects off the lenses and hairlines tend to blend awkwardly into the background instead of following a natural line. 

A still, unmoving face while someone is actively speaking is another common tell. Real conversation involves small, constant movement. AI-generated video often doesn’t. 

The good news is that organizations don’t have to win an arms race against AI. The most effective defence is often a simple business process: independently verify unusual requests involving money, credentials or sensitive information through a trusted communication channel. Good procedures are much harder for criminals to fake than voices or faces. 

None of these signs are foolproof on their own. The reliable fix is procedural, not visual: verify significant or unusual requests through a second channel, using contact information already on file.

For Business Owners 

• Set a verification protocol: a shared phrase or second-approval rule for high-value transfers that only authorized staff know. 
• Always monitor: tools like attack surface scanning and dark web monitoring work best running year-round, not just after an incident. 
• Make training mandatory: run regular phishing simulations and require security awareness training, not just a once-a-year module. Ongoing security awareness training cuts phishing click rates by 86% within a year, according to KnowBe4’s 2025 benchmarking report. 

Cost can often be the barrier to this kind of training. The BOXX Academy Pro solution was built to close that gap. It delivers comprehensive cyber security training that includes monthly lessons and graded assessments, with full-team analytics that let managers track progress, at a price point that puts the same level of training within reach for businesses of any size. By providing ongoing education and real-time insights into training effectiveness, BOXX Academy Pro helps create a resilient security culture across any organization. 

For Employees 

• Verify independently: never authorize a payment or share sensitive data based on an urgent video, audio or email request alone. Confirm through a known number or channel. 
• Report immediately: if a fraudulent request gets through, don’t forward it. Screenshot it and alert IT or security right away. 
• Move fast if funds are gone: contact the bank immediately to attempt a stop payment or call back; and file a report with the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. For BOXX clients, Hackbusters are there 24/7 to help. 

Closing the Gap on Deepfake and AI-Driven Fraud 

Deepfake and AI-driven fraud will continue making familiar business communications harder to trust. Canadian businesses need clear verification processes employees can follow and cyber protection that responds when a convincing fake gets through. 

Deepfakes are no longer limited to finance teams. HR, IT, customer service and executives are increasingly being targeted through convincing voice, video and email impersonation designed to bypass normal trust relationships. 

Cyberboxx® Business combines dedicated coverage with Cyberboxx® Assist services that help businesses identify vulnerabilities and prepare employees, with 24/7 access to Hackbusters® experts to call when something looks wrong. 

The tools criminals use will keep getting better. Canadian businesses need to keep pace, with both their people, technology and their protection.