A WhatsApp message appeared to come from one of Italy’s most powerful banking executives. Then came a phone call from what seemed to be a familiar and highly respected lawyer. The conversation sounded legitimate, the financial operation appeared plausible, and the urgency was convincing.
But the people on the other side of the communication were not who they claimed to be.
The result was an extraordinary financial fraud involving Fideuram, the private-banking arm of Intesa Sanpaolo, and an attempted transfer of roughly €95 million in February 2026.
The case has now become one of the clearest examples in Italy of how artificial intelligence is changing executive impersonation fraud. Criminals allegedly combined fake digital identities, WhatsApp messages, forged documents, international bank accounts and an AI-generated voice clone to convince Paolo Molesini, then chairman of Fideuram, that he was helping Intesa Sanpaolo complete a confidential international banking transaction.
Most of the money was eventually stopped or recovered. The latest figures contained in the judicial documents cited by ANSA indicate that €39.5 million remains unrecovered, although earlier reports referred to approximately €36 million. The difference reflects the evolving reconstruction of the investigation.

It started with a message that looked real

The alleged operation began on February 23, according to the investigation.
Molesini received a WhatsApp message from someone presenting himself as Carlo Messina, the chief executive of Intesa Sanpaolo.
The number was different from the one normally associated with Messina, but the story presented in the message was designed to make the unusual communication appear reasonable.
The alleged Messina explained that Intesa was dealing with a sensitive international acquisition and that the operation could not be handled directly by the parent company because of concerns about information leaking before the transaction was completed.
Fideuram, according to the fake explanation, would therefore be used as the vehicle through which the operation could be executed.
This was an important part of the fraud. The criminals did not simply say, “Send money immediately.”
They created a financial narrative around the request.
The supposed acquisition, the confidentiality requirements and the references to regulatory complications were intended to make the transfers look like part of a legitimate corporate transaction.
According to the judicial reconstruction, the story may also have appeared plausible because it was linked to an earlier situation involving a potential acquisition that had allegedly been affected by a leak.
The criminals were therefore not relying on one fake message. They were constructing a believable environment around it.

Then the voice clone entered the story

The second stage made the deception considerably more sophisticated.
Molesini was contacted by someone who appeared to be Paolo Nastasi, managing partner of A&O Shearman Italy.
Nastasi was not involved in the fraud and was unaware that his identity was allegedly being used.
The choice was significant because Molesini knew the lawyer.
A familiar voice could therefore serve as a powerful confirmation that the operation was real.
Investigators believe the criminals used artificial intelligence to reproduce the lawyer’s voice.
This is what is known as voice cloning.
Instead of simply sending an email from a fake account, the attackers were able to create the impression of a real conversation with a known professional.
The technology did not have to create a perfect human being. It only had to make the telephone interaction convincing enough for the victim to believe that the person on the other end was genuine.
That distinction matters.
Modern AI fraud does not necessarily depend on spectacular deepfake videos or elaborate computer attacks. Sometimes a few seconds of convincing audio, combined with a plausible story and information about the target, can be enough to lower a person's suspicion.

Documents made the story look official

The operation reportedly went beyond WhatsApp and the phone call.
According to the judicial documents, the alleged lawyer sent a series of documents to Molesini, including an apparent confidentiality agreement and a special power of attorney that appeared to have been signed by Messina.
In total, investigators refer to eleven documents being transmitted during the operation.
The criminals then provided the bank coordinates for the transfers.
At the same time, the head of Fideuram's treasury and payments operations was reportedly contacted by another person pretending to be Fideuram's chief executive.
That person allegedly told the treasury official that Molesini would soon request urgent and confidential transfers.
This is an important detail because it suggests that the fraud was designed to work across several levels of the organization.
The criminals were not simply trying to deceive one individual.
They were attempting to create a consistent chain of instructions in which different people would appear to confirm the same story.
Once that structure was accepted, the transfers could begin.

The money moved internationally

The total amount involved was approximately €95 million.
The funds were sent mainly toward accounts in China and Hong Kong, with other transfers involving additional jurisdictions.
The international nature of the operation immediately created a race against time.
Fideuram detected irregularities and activated international banking cooperation mechanisms.
Authorities in several countries were then involved in tracing and freezing the funds.
According to the judicial reconstruction cited by ANSA, approximately €42 million was stopped in Chinese accounts, while more than €13 million was frozen in Portugal.
These interventions prevented the entire amount from disappearing.
The remaining funds followed a more complicated path.
Investigators say some of the money moved through accounts in Malta, Luxembourg and the Netherlands before reaching a Canadian money-transfer platform and, eventually, Bitcoin wallets.
This is why the case is now partly a traditional financial investigation and partly a cryptocurrency tracing operation.

Why the missing figure changed from €36 million to €39.5 million

When the story first became public, several reports said that around €36 million was still missing.
That figure was repeated by Reuters and RaiNews in their initial reconstructions.
The judicial documents subsequently reported by ANSA put the unrecovered amount at €39.5 million.
For an article updated to September 30, the latter figure is the more recent figure to use.
It is also important to understand what the number does not mean.
It does not mean that €95 million was permanently lost.
A substantial portion was stopped or recovered after the fraud was detected, and further recovery efforts remain possible.
The €39.5 million figure represents the amount that, according to the latest judicial reconstruction cited in the reporting, had not yet been recovered at that stage of the investigation.

A 48-year-old Israeli national is under investigation

The Milan investigation has identified a 48-year-old Israeli national as one of the people allegedly connected to the operation.
The individual is under investigation, not convicted.
According to the judicial documents, roughly €4 million linked to the fraud passed through accounts associated with him before moving through other financial channels and eventually into Bitcoin wallets.
There is also an important uncertainty.
Investigators still need to establish whether the identity used by the suspect corresponds to a real person or whether it could itself be a false identity used as another layer in the financial chain.
That is why international judicial cooperation remains central to the case.
Tracing the money is not necessarily the same thing as identifying the people who planned the operation.
A bank account can reveal a destination without immediately revealing the person who controls the entire network behind it.

Molesini's resignation came in March

The case also puts new context around Paolo Molesini's departure from Fideuram.
He resigned from his position in March 2026, citing personal reasons.
At the time, the fraud had not been publicly disclosed.
The later emergence of the investigation naturally raised questions about the timing, but available reporting does not indicate that Molesini is being investigated as a participant in the alleged fraud.
On the contrary, the investigation describes him as the person who was deceived into believing that the transactions were legitimate.
This distinction is important in any report about an ongoing criminal investigation: being the target of a sophisticated fraud and being suspected of helping commit it are two completely different things.

This was not a conventional cyberattack on Fideuram

Calling the case simply a “hack of Fideuram” would be misleading.
There is no evidence in the available reconstruction that criminals broke directly into Fideuram's banking systems and then initiated the transfers themselves.
The operation appears instead to have relied on social engineering and impersonation.
The attackers allegedly persuaded authorized people to initiate legitimate banking operations based on false information.
That distinction is increasingly important in cybersecurity.
A bank can have sophisticated firewalls, encryption, monitoring systems and fraud-detection tools and still face a major risk if an authorized employee or executive is convinced that a fraudulent instruction is genuine.
The attackers did not necessarily need to defeat the bank's technical defenses.
They needed to make the people operating inside the system trust the wrong identity.

The same type of fraud hit Banca Ifis

The Fideuram case is not the only investigation now being examined by Milan prosecutors.
A second case involves Banca Ifis and reportedly occurred in May.
A manager was allegedly convinced through communications that appeared to come from another person inside the bank to authorize transfers totaling approximately €23.8 million to €24 million.
The money moved through international accounts involving Spain, Singapore, Hong Kong and Bahrain.
The bank reacted quickly enough to recover approximately €20 million, with funds frozen in different jurisdictions and a preventive seizure carried out in Spain.
The case remains separate from the Fideuram investigation.
Authorities have not established that the same criminal organization was responsible for both incidents.
What connects them is the method: fraudulent communications, impersonation and sophisticated digital techniques designed to exploit trust.

A third bank was targeted as well

A third investigation concerns a smaller banking institution and an alleged fraud of approximately €2 million.
Part of that money was recovered in Croatia.
Again, the case is being investigated separately.
The investigators are therefore dealing with at least three distinct investigations in Milan rather than one confirmed criminal network.
It would be premature to conclude that the same group was behind all three operations.
But the similarities are difficult to ignore.
Fake messages, apparently legitimate internal identities, urgent financial instructions and AI-assisted voice impersonation are becoming part of a new fraud toolkit aimed at senior executives and financial departments.

AI is changing CEO fraud

CEO fraud is not a new criminal technique.
For years, attackers have impersonated company executives through email and messaging platforms, trying to persuade employees to authorize payments.
What has changed is the quality of the deception.
Artificial intelligence can generate convincing written messages, reproduce the communication style of executives, create documents and, most importantly, clone voices.
That removes one of the traditional warning signs of social engineering.
A person who receives a suspicious email can inspect the address.
A person who receives a strange message can call the supposed sender through a known number.
But when the phone rings and the voice on the other side sounds exactly like someone the victim knows, the psychological barrier can be much lower.
The Fideuram case shows how powerful that combination can become when voice cloning is inserted into an otherwise carefully constructed financial story.

The AI was a tool, not an autonomous thief

There is also a danger in describing the case too dramatically.
Artificial intelligence did not independently decide to steal €95 million.
The available investigation points to criminals using AI-based tools as part of a broader fraud operation.
The technology helped them imitate people and make the deception more credible.
The human criminal infrastructure remains essential: obtaining information about the target, creating false identities, controlling accounts, moving funds between countries and converting money into cryptocurrency.
AI has not replaced the criminal organization.
It has made the impersonation layer much more convincing.

Intesa was already dealing with fake AI videos

The case also emerged at a time when Intesa Sanpaolo was already reporting a significant increase in fraudulent AI-generated content.
Antonio De Vita, the group's chief security officer, said that around 5,000 fake videos generated with AI had been identified and removed since the beginning of 2026, many of them using the image of CEO Carlo Messina.
This matters because the Fideuram fraud did not happen in a vacuum.
The digital identity of senior executives is increasingly being copied and reused for fraudulent purposes.
A photograph can be fake. A video can be fake. A voice can be fake.
And the combination of all three can create an identity that looks remarkably convincing to someone who is not expecting an attack.

The real vulnerability is trust

The most interesting lesson from the case is not actually WhatsApp.
It is trust.
The criminals allegedly combined several elements that, individually, might have seemed insufficient but together created a convincing story.
There was a senior executive.
There was a confidential corporate transaction.
There was a lawyer.
There were documents.
There was a familiar voice.
There were urgent instructions.
And there was a reason why the operation supposedly had to remain confidential.
Each element reinforced the others.
That is how sophisticated social engineering works.
The victim does not have to believe something absurd.
The attacker needs to construct a situation that is just plausible enough to prevent the victim from stopping and independently verifying the instruction.

Why the recovery operation matters

The fact that a large portion of the money was recovered is also significant.
International transfers can move quickly, but they still leave traces across banks and payment systems.
The ability to freeze funds shortly after a fraudulent transaction can make the difference between a recoverable loss and a permanent one.
In the Fideuram case, cooperation involving several jurisdictions helped block tens of millions of euros.
That does not eliminate the damage caused by the fraud, but it shows that international financial cooperation remains one of the strongest tools available once a major cross-border fraud has been detected.
The unresolved €39.5 million, however, demonstrates how quickly the picture changes when money reaches cryptocurrency networks and moves across multiple jurisdictions.

What investigators still need to establish

The investigation remains open.
Authorities still need to identify the other people allegedly involved, determine how the attackers obtained the information necessary to construct such a credible story and establish the full path of the missing money.
They must also determine whether the three Milan investigations are connected.
For the Fideuram case, another key question concerns the final destination of the €39.5 million still unrecovered.
Cryptocurrency transactions can be traced on public blockchains in many circumstances, but tracing a transaction does not automatically identify the person controlling a wallet.
Investigators therefore need cooperation from exchanges, payment providers and authorities in different countries.
The case is likely to remain international for some time.

A warning for banks, companies and executives

The Fideuram investigation illustrates a broader problem that is likely to become increasingly relevant.
Security procedures cannot rely only on passwords, firewalls and fraud-detection software.
Organizations also need procedures designed specifically for AI-assisted impersonation.
A high-value transfer should be independently confirmed through a separate communication channel.
A request received through WhatsApp should not become legitimate simply because it appears to come from a senior executive.
A familiar voice should no longer be treated as proof of identity.
And confidentiality should never become a reason to eliminate independent verification.
The more convincing AI becomes, the more important these human and procedural controls will become.

The case is bigger than Fideuram

The €95 million Fideuram fraud is extraordinary because of the amount involved, but its real significance may lie elsewhere.
It shows that the traditional distinction between cyberattack and human fraud is becoming increasingly blurred.
Criminals can use technology to attack the weakest point in a highly protected financial environment: the assumption that the person giving the instruction is actually who they claim to be.
The investigation will determine who was behind the operation and how much of the money can ultimately be recovered.
For now, however, one conclusion is already clear.
The era in which a familiar voice was enough to establish trust is ending.
In an environment where artificial intelligence can reproduce the voice, language and appearance of almost anyone, the safest question is no longer simply “Do I recognize this person?”
It is “What independent evidence proves that this instruction is really from them?”
That may be the most important lesson to come out of the Fideuram case.

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