A cloned voice and a WhatsApp message moved €95m out of Intesa's private bank

On 25 September 2026, Corriere della Sera and Reuters each reported that Fideuram, the private banking arm of Intesa Sanpaolo, had transferred roughly €95m to accounts abroad in February after its chairman was deceived by a fake WhatsApp message and a synthetic voice. About €53m has been recovered. Around €36m has not.

Both accounts rest on unnamed sources. Intesa Sanpaolo and Fideuram declined to comment.

How it was done

The version reported by Corriere and summarised by Il Sole 24 Ore runs as follows. Paolo Molesini, then Fideuram’s chairman, received a WhatsApp message that appeared to come from Carlo Messina, chief executive of the parent bank. The message asked him to arrange a series of transfers through Fideuram’s treasury, urgently, so that Intesa would not lose a transaction abroad, and explained that practical obstacles prevented Intesa from handling the payments itself.

A telephone call followed. The caller appeared to be Paolo Nastasi, managing partner of A&O Shearman in Italy and a lawyer Molesini knew. The voice had been reconstructed using AI tools. Nastasi had no involvement in the fraud and no knowledge of it. The transfers then went out, mainly to China and Hong Kong.

Fideuram identified the irregularity shortly afterwards and alerted banks and authorities in several countries. A Chinese institution froze and returned €40m. Milan prosecutors Alfonso Serritiello and Barbara Benzi, working with counterparts in Lisbon under Eurojust, seized a further €13m held in Portugal. The balance passed through several foreign accounts and was converted into cryptocurrency, which investigators are now attempting to trace through letters rogatory. Milan is investigating a foreign national resident outside Europe on suspicion of computer fraud. Molesini resigned as chairman in March, citing personal reasons. He is not under investigation and the bank brought no proceedings against him.

What is unusual here

Chief-executive impersonation is an old fraud. What is new is who was deceived. The target was not a clerk in accounts payable but the chairman of a private bank, and the instruction reached him through two channels he had reason to trust: a message from a boss whose writing style he knew, and the voice of a lawyer he had worked with. The fraudsters did not break into anything. They only had to sound right.

The recovery figures matter as much as the loss. Just over half the money came back, and it came back because the anomaly was caught within days and the interbank channels were used immediately. The portion that reached cryptocurrency did not.

What it means for family offices

A family office has the same conditions, usually in a more concentrated form. The team is small and the principal’s instruction carries a weight that no written procedure quite counterbalances. Payments are often authorised on a call rather than through a bank’s four-eyes process, and there is rarely a treasury department in a position to say no.

The remedy is the familiar one: verify out of band, apply it to everyone including the principal, and call back on a number held on file rather than the number that rang. What this case adds is that seniority made the fraud easier, not harder, and that a trusted adviser’s voice now works as a credential that can be forged from public recordings. Anyone who speaks at conferences or appears on podcasts should assume their voice is available.

The other lesson concerns the first hour. Fideuram got €53m back because it spotted the problem quickly and knew who to call. A family office with no documented escalation route, including which bank contacts to reach outside office hours, will recover nothing.

Sources: Il Sole 24 Ore; Reuters, via Private Banker International; ANSA.