Deepfake Fraud Taking Place On an Industrial Scale, Study Finds (theguardian.com)
- Reference: 0180761736
- News link: https://tech.slashdot.org/story/26/02/09/1844248/deepfake-fraud-taking-place-on-an-industrial-scale-study-finds
- Source link: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/06/deepfake-taking-place-on-an-industrial-scale-study-finds
> Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams -- leveraging, for example, deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus -- are no longer niche, but [1]inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale , said the analysis from the AI Incident Database.
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> It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of "impersonation for profit," including a deepfake video of Western Australia's premier, Robert Cook, hawking an investment scheme, and deepfake doctors promoting skin creams. These examples are part of a trend in which scammers are using widely available AI tools to perpetuate increasingly targeted heists. Last year, a finance officer at a Singaporean multinational paid out nearly $500,000 to scammers during what he believed was a video call with company leadership. UK consumers are estimated to have lost $12.86bn to fraud in the nine months to November 2025.
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> "Capabilities have suddenly reached that level where fake content can be produced by pretty much anybody," said Simon Mylius, an MIT researcher who works on a project linked to the AI Incident Database. He calculates that "frauds, scams and targeted manipulation" have made up the largest proportion of incidents reported to the database in 11 of the past 12 months. He said: "It's become very accessible to a point where there is really effectively no barrier to entry."
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/06/deepfake-taking-place-on-an-industrial-scale-study-finds
Is there anything AI doesn't make worse? (Score:2)
Anything?
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Snorkeling? Sauerkraut pickling?
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AI is decent at chess. Keeps the kids occupied.
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Nah, its ruining chess too. Sites like chess.com its getting harder and harder to find a decent game where your playing a similar ranked human and not getting your shit kicked in by some cheater using stockfish.
This is how one loses faith in systems... (Score:5, Interesting)
There is a very important reason why in history, fraud was aggressively hunted down and destroyed. There comes a time when people will just stop trusting the system. Social media goes back to more decentralized items, perhaps just direct messaging or servers like Discord, or IRC channels. People stop using auction sites, and go back to word of mouth, or trusted supply lines with buyer guarantees. When finding a deal online becomes a gamble, we may even see a swing back to physical purchases, where a successor of Sears that may be a bit more expensive, but has a solid warranty, with some type of assurance that everything bought in the store will be useful and not junk.
If banks start becoming untrustworthy, people will take their cash and use their mattresses as ATMs. Same thing will happen with mail order, or other scamming vectors. For example, fewer and fewer people sell stuff on auction sites because someone will take the item, replace it with a lesser one, and then say they were cheated. Even if the sending of the package was filmed and signed, this rampant fraud can easily make it unprofitable for someone to work with auction sites. Maybe it might be good to use those old malls and start having flea markets again.
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> There is a very important reason why in history, fraud was aggressively hunted down and destroyed. There comes a time when people will just stop trusting the system
I'm not sure what time in history you are talking about.
And platforms do nothing to stop it (Score:3)
Platforms can fight fire with fire. AI can be trained to to spot fraudulent activity based on some very recognisable patterns scammers use. The way that accounts are set up, the IP addresses they come in through, the ways campaigns are set up, the images, video and audio transcripts used by the scammers, the links the campaign leads to - burner sites, DNS entries etc.
There is sufficient information in that data for a platform like Facebook, or YouTube to at least red flag accounts and get some humans to look at it. If that's too much effort for a platform, then make it easier for users to report scams. Even a toggle flag close to the ad which allows people to say "I think this may be a scam" instead of making them fill in a frigging form.
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Except [1]platforms earn a significant part of their revenue from scams [reuters.com] (for FB, over 10%). So the incentive to curb scamming is not there...
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigations/meta-is-earning-fortune-deluge-fraudulent-ads-documents-show-2025-11-06/
"An analysis has said." (Score:2)
Who wrote this analysis ?
No, I mean who *really* wrote it ?
Taking place on an Industrial scale? (Score:2)
Sounds like real science I guess.. But it also sounds like someone was trying to weigh yo mamma.
Soon Donald will actually be correct: (Score:2)
everything everywhere will be rigged.
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And he'll get his cut.
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Don't worry he has put [1]Jared Kushner in charge of the anti deepfake club [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WfZuNceFDM&t=679s