Someone joined your video call as your CFO. Now what?

The reassuring assumption was that video would remain hard to fake in real time. It did not. Live face and voice replacement now runs on consumer hardware, and the environment it has to survive is forgiving: a compressed stream, a laptop webcam, poor lighting and a meeting that lasts eight minutes.

#Why the usual advice fails

People are told to look for unnatural blinking, blurred edges around the jaw, or lighting that does not match. These artefacts are real, they are shrinking every release cycle, and asking a payments officer to perform forensic analysis while a senior leader waits impatiently is not a control. It is a hope.

Worse, this advice produces false confidence. Somebody who examined the video and found nothing odd is now more likely to comply, not less.

#Shift the question

The question is never "is this video real?" It is "has this request been confirmed through a channel the caller does not control?"

Once framed that way, the protocol writes itself and does not depend on anyone's ability to spot a rendering artefact.

#A protocol that survives the moment

• Classify the request. Anything that moves money, changes payment details, grants access, shares credentials or bypasses an approval is a verified-request category. Everything else is an ordinary meeting.
• Pause without apology. The phrase to teach is short: "I'll confirm this through the usual process and come straight back to you." It ends the interaction without negotiation.
• Verify out of band. Message the person on the internal chat system, or call the number already stored in the directory. Not a number, address or link provided during the call.
• Use a liveness challenge if you cannot leave. Ask them to turn their head fully to profile, pass a hand slowly across their face, or hold up a specific object and describe it. Current real-time systems degrade visibly. Treat this as a delaying tactic, not proof.
• Escalate on refusal. A genuine executive will accept a ninety-second delay. Resistance to verification is the single strongest signal available, and it is the one signal that does not improve with better models.
• Log it either way. Even a false alarm tells you which pretexts are being tried against your organisation.

#Make it a policy, not a personality test

The protocol only works if declining is procedurally correct rather than personally risky. That requires leadership to say, publicly and more than once, that they expect to be challenged and will not be annoyed by it. In practice, an executive who has personally been verified and thanked their staff for it does more for resilience than an entire training platform.

#Rehearse before you need it

Run the scenario. A consented deepfake simulation against your finance and executive teams, followed by an honest, blame-free debrief, converts an abstract policy into a memory. People who have felt the pressure once behave differently the second time, and the second time is the one that counts.