Approval chains assume the people in them are real
A finance worker paid out $25 million after a video call with his CFO and colleagues. Every participant was synthetic. Nothing about the call was checked, because approval chains verify authority, not presence.
Where the chain breaks
Maker-checker controls establish that two authorized accounts approved something. They say nothing about whether the humans behind those accounts participated. A convincing real-time impersonation satisfies every control in the chain.
The failure is not that the controls are weak. It is that they were designed when impersonating a colleague on a live call was impractical. That assumption no longer holds.
Presence inserts a check at the moment authority is exercised: a live human, on a device you trust, bound to this specific action — with the verdict available before the transfer commits.
Check it yourself
The artifacts behind this page
- The verdict arrives before execution, not as an alert afterwards.What happens when it fails →
- Watch a synthetic presence profile get blocked in the browser.Run the live demo →