February 6, 2026
The project MIMER — Mitigating Presentation Attacks in Remote Identity Proofing - is a collaboration between the University of Glasgow and University of Engineering and Technology Taxila (UETT) in Pakistan. I had the pleasure of being asked to talk at an event organised by MIMER. I spoke on the subject of audio deep fakes, the process of copying or cloning a person’s voice so it can be used by a speech synthesis system and potentially used to impersonate a person for fraudulent purposes.
The event was very well organised with some other wonderful speakers on subjects ranging from Deepfake Detection and Know Your Customer (KYC) Vulnerability by Edinburgh company Datambit , Fraud Patterns and the Verification Gap by Charlotte Sadd from CIFAS and an incisive policy perspective from Dr Andrea Szymkowiak .
The shift towards digital channels for financial transactions has led to an increase in fraudulent financial transactions. This is a particular problem in low-middle-income countries like Pakistan due to weak remote identity proofing, but also an increasing problem in countries such as the UK where new AI techniques can be used to spoof KYC systems. The MIMER project explores engineering approaches that can mitigate these risks across with techniques such as combining audio and visual biometrics for robust verification resistant to single-mode attacks.