How ‘Deepfake Elon Musk’ Became the Internet’s Biggest Scammer
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I understand that the AI deepfakes are quite realistic, but this behavior doesn't make sense even if the video was actually authentic. Dumping your entire retirement savings into a random investment because a celebrity told you to in a YouTube video? What is wrong with people?
People put in $248 and "test" things out and see the same kinds of account details they see for their regular investments and bank accounts.
People can often withdraw small amounts from their test accounts and so they put in more, they see digital account balances showing returns from investment and so it goes.
It all looks legit until it isn't and there's no getting your money back.
Not everbody is an IT genius with a Fintech CV, nor is everybody dumber than a rock .. in the valley betwen is where these scams operate.
This goes back at least a year or three, a famous Australian multi billionaire mining magnate raised a stink about his image and voice featuring in faked "endorsement videos" .. along with several other well known Australian billionaires.
The prevalence of the phony ads prompted Andrew Forrest, an Australian billionaire whose videos were also used to create deepfake ads on Facebook, to file a civil lawsuit against Meta, its parent company, for negligence in how its ad business is run. He claimed that Facebook’s advertising business lured “innocent users into bad investments.”
Meta, which owns Facebook, said the company was training automated detection systems to catch fraud on its platform, but also described a cat-and-mouse game where well-funded scammers constantly shifted their tactics to evade detection.
My mum would have done exactly the same thing.
At 80 with early onset dementia she would fall for any scam.
She even paid for a monthly PC tech magazine that got delivered every month. She couldnt even manage a dumb phone let alone understand the first thing about tech.
Any smart talking sales person could get her to sign up for anything, she had an over abundance of trust and she certainly would not be able to to tell the difference between an deepfake or a real person.