Fideuram, the private banking arm of Intesa Sanpaolo and manager of some €450 billion in assets, was defrauded of nearly €95 million in February after staff were deceived by an artificial intelligence-generated voice and a spoofed messaging app conversation, according to details of the case now emerging from Milan.
The fraud began on February 23, when Fideuram president Paolo Molesini received a WhatsApp message purporting to come from Carlo Messina, chief executive of Intesa Sanpaolo. The message set in motion a chain of instructions that led Fideuram's chief financial officer to authorise a transfer of close to €95 million to accounts in China and Hong Kong.
A phone call reinforced the deception. The voice on the line was cloned to impersonate Paolo Nastasi, managing partner at the Italian office of law firm A&O Shearman, the entity formed from the merger of Allen & Overy and Shearman & Sterling. The firm itself had no involvement in the fraud; its name and Nastasi's voice were used without its knowledge.
Recovery efforts
Fideuram filed a complaint through lawyer Guido Alleva, prompting an investigation by Milan prosecutors Alfonso Serritiello and Barbara Benzi. Through interbank cooperation, €53 million of the stolen funds have so far been recovered: an unnamed Chinese bank froze and returned €40 million, while a Portuguese bank blocked a further €13 million after judge Sonia Mancini ordered the seizure of the funds.
That leaves €39.5 million unaccounted for, which investigators say has been converted into cryptocurrency, complicating further recovery.
Molesini left the presidency of Fideuram on March 12. The bank cited personal reasons for his departure, without drawing any explicit link to the fraud.
Part of a wider pattern
The Fideuram case fits a pattern of AI-enabled fraud targeting corporate treasuries. In 2024, an employee of engineering firm Arup transferred $25 million after a video conference in Hong Kong featuring deepfaked participants. The FBI recorded $2.77 billion in losses tied to wire transfer scams in 2024 and logged more than 22,000 complaints involving AI, including cloned voices, in 2025, with declared losses of $893 million.
Italy has seen similar incidents before. Sisal lost €5.5 million and Maire Tecnimont €18 million in comparable schemes. Former Inter Milan president Massimo Moratti was also targeted, deceived by a cloned voice posing as Italy's Defense Minister into sending €1 million to Hong Kong and the Netherlands; nearly all of that sum was eventually returned.
Law enforcement has previously demonstrated an ability to trace and seize crypto assets tied to major crimes, including the FBI's recovery of 63.7 bitcoins from the Colonial Pipeline ransom in 2021 and the US Justice Department's 2022 seizure of 94,636 bitcoins linked to the 2016 Bitfinex hack, then worth $3.6 billion. Whether similar tracing will apply to the funds still missing from the Fideuram case remains to be seen.
The incident comes weeks after Intesa Sanpaolo disclosed $100 million in spot Bitcoin ETF holdings, underscoring the bank's growing exposure to digital assets even as one of its subsidiaries grapples with losses tied to the same asset class.
