In 2024, a finance worker in Hong Kong was deceived by scammers using deepfake video technology, resulting in a $25 million loss. This incident highlights the growing threat of deepfake fraud, which companies like Pindrop Security are working to combat.
Vijay Balasubramaniyan, CEO and co-founder of Pindrop Security and a Georgia Tech alumnus, has observed a sharp increase in deepfake attacks. “We used to get about one deepfake a month at the beginning of 2023,” he said. “Now we’re seeing seven deep-fake attacks per customer every day.”
Balasubramaniyan founded Pindrop Security in 2011 based on research conducted during his Ph.D. studies at Georgia Tech with advisor Mustaque Ahamad. The company initially focused on detecting deception in voice calls for banks but expanded its services as remote business interactions increased during the pandemic and generative artificial intelligence made it easier to imitate voices and faces.
“That has been by far the biggest tailwind for Pindrop,” Balasubramaniyan said. “Everything requires strong identification and strong security.”
Pindrop introduced its first deepfake protection product eight years ago and continues to develop new solutions. The company recently secured $100 million from investors to expand its deepfake video detection capabilities, including a new system designed to identify deepfakes during live video conference meetings.
“Am I hiring the right candidate?” Balasubramaniyan asked. “Or is this person I’m interviewing not who they said they are? I was surprised, but that’s our biggest use case.”
He explained how Pindrop’s technology distinguishes between real and fake participants: “Humans pattern-match a lot,” he said. “We always look for familiarity in a noisy world. It’s easy to fool a human.” Instead of searching for similarities, Pindrop’s systems analyze thousands of data points per second to detect subtle inconsistencies that AI-generated media might introduce.
“We’re able to pick up so many variances,” Balasubramaniyan noted, “and there are so many places for these generative AI systems to make a mistake.” The technology can also identify which system created fraudulent voice calls.
Balasubramaniyan described how quickly hackers have adopted deepfakes, referencing an example involving a fraudster named Williams: “Williams is a guy out of West Africa,” he said. “For the longest time, he’d employ 12 different people, and all day they would dial for dollars. We started seeing Williams replace each of those 12 people with a large language model combined with a text-to-speech system. Now that AI has full-blown conversations with people, they can’t tell the difference. And the bots don’t sleep – they work 24 hours.”
Balasubramaniyan maintains ties with Georgia Tech Computing faculty, especially his former advisor Ahamad, who holds an interest in Pindrop.
“Vijay’s Ph.D. research was of the highest quality, and the Pindrop paper was published in one of the top-tier security conferences,” Ahamad said. “However, because of his work experience before coming to Georgia Tech, he also focused on the real-world relevance of his research, which led to the launch of Pindrop Security. He is a great example of impactful research that students conduct in our laboratories.”
Balasubramaniyan prefers hiring fellow alumni from Georgia Tech: “Georgia Tech is a great school for our research teams to hire from,” he said.
He and his wife have endowed a scholarship at Georgia Tech aimed at supporting students with financial need: Both are immigrants, and “we want to help other people who have big dreams and small pockets.” He added: “A lot of these folks, we talk to them, we tell them what we see in the market, we open our networks to them. We’re very fortunate that Georgia Tech allows us to participate in such a meaningful way.”
According to Balasubramaniyan, Georgia Tech produces talented graduates because it is not located in Silicon Valley: “Because we sit here in the South and Atlanta, the ideas we come up with aren’t the latest fad. They’re rooted in great science or great tech. We’re naturally great thinkers because we aren’t fad-chasers.”
