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With the development and iteration of artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI is reshaping daily life at an unprecedented speed, but the new scams and new tricks derived from it are also refreshing people's understanding of risk prevention. Behind this is not only the property safety of consumers, but also the risks and hidden dangers of personal safety.

Recently, foreign media exposed a new type of digital fraud, in which fraudsters used complex AI tools to create videos of celebrities such as Tesla CEO Musk, and used these "AI celebrities" to endorse various fake products or "investments" and promised high returns on investment.

In one typical case, a so-called foreign exchange company endorsed by "AI Musk" easily defrauded an 82-year-old retiree of his life savings of more than US$690,000 (about RMB 4.95 million).

In this type of scam, scammers usually first find a real video interviewing Musk, then use AI tools to replace his voice and use lip sync technology to edit Musk's mouth shape to make the video look more real. For ordinary people, this kind of fake video may be very difficult to distinguish.

In addition to Musk, "Oracle of Omaha" Buffett and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are also celebrities who often appear in such scam videos.

"AI Musk" is rampant, and it only takes a few minutes to generate, but some people have been defrauded of nearly 5 million yuan

In recent months, thousands of AI-powered videos known as deepfakes have flooded the internet.According to Deloitte estimates, AI-driven “deep fake” videos/ads are expected to cause billions of dollars in fraud losses each year.

However,These videos cost a negligible amount of money to produce, at just a few dollars, and can be completed in just a few minutes.Such videos are widely promoted on social media by celebrity influencers, including paid advertising on Facebook, which amplifies their reach.

The scammers will start with a real video, such as the following video from the Wall Street Journal interview with Musk. The questioner is Thorold Barker, an editor of the newspaper, and his voice is also heard in the video clip.

Image source: The Wall Street Journal

In the deepfake video, Musk's mouth movements were edited using lip sync technology, which can adjust the way a person speaks. The scammers also add AI voices using voice cloning tools, which can copy any voice they want from a sample. As a result, the final video can be quite convincing to the average internet user.

Some people have been deceived by this.Steve Beauchamp, an 82-year-old retiree, is a typical example. According to foreign media reports, at the end of last year, Beauchamp, an 82-year-old retiree, watched a video advertisement in which Musk supported an aggressive investment opportunity that promised a quick return, and his lip movements and voice were highly consistent.It also incorporates Musk's signature South African accent.It looked extremely real. So Beauchamp contacted the foreign exchange company behind the advertisement called Magna-FX and opened an account with $248. After a series of transactions over several weeks, Beauchamp exhausted his retirement account and eventually invested more than $690,000 (about 4.95 million yuan), all of which was lost.

According toAccording to a report from the U.S. Business Improvement Bureau, a nonprofit consumer advocacy group, a Texas man said he lost $36,000 worth of Bitcoin after seeing Musk speak in a so-called YouTube "live" video in February 2023. He said, "I sent the Bitcoin and never received anything again."

Sensity, a company responsible for monitoring and detecting "deep fakes", analyzed more than 2,000 deep fake videos and found that so far,Musk is the most common "AI image" in such videos. Specifically, since the end of last year, "AI Musk" has appeared in nearly 1/4 of the "deep fake" scams. In cryptocurrency-related "deep fake" videos, his frequency of appearance is as high as 90%.

In this regard, experts who study the cryptocurrency community say that Musk has a unique fan base around the world, including conservatives, anti-establishment groups and cryptocurrency enthusiasts, who are often attracted to alternative ways to make money.This also makes them a perfect target for digital scammers. And among this group, older Internet users are often more likely to be targeted by scammers. This group is very familiar with cryptocurrency, AI and Musk, but their vigilance is often insufficient.

In addition to Musk, "Oracle of Omaha" Buffett and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos are also celebrities who often appear in such scam videos.

AI technology has become a fraud tool, with Facebook and Youtube being the hardest hit

Foreign media reported that at present, it is difficult to quantify how many "deep fake" videos are circulating on the Internet, but searching for common keywords of these scams in Facebook's advertising library can find hundreds of thousands of advertisements, many of which contain "deep fake" videos.

Although Facebook has removed many videos that violated its policies and shut down some accounts, other videos are still circulating online, and it seems that more videos appear every day. Not only Facebook, but YouTube is also full of these fake videos, and they often use the "live" label. But in fact, these videos are pre-recorded "deep fake" videos.

YouTube said in a statement that in the first quarter of this year alone,More than 15.7 million channels and more than 8.2 million videos were deleted.Most of this content was removed for violating its anti-spam policy.

The prevalence of such "deep fake" ads has also led Australian billionaire Andrew Forrest to file a civil lawsuit against Facebook's parent company Meta for negligence in its advertising business operations. He believes that Facebook's advertising business has induced "innocent users to make wrong investments." Meta said it is training automatic detection systems to catch fraud on its platform, but also mentioned that well-funded fraudsters will constantly change their strategies to evade detection.YouTube said its policies prohibit fraud and doctored videos, and in March this year it required creators to disclose when they use AI to create real content.

In fact, digital fraud is not new, but since the AI ​​tools were open sourced last year, a new wave of "deep fake" videos has emerged.

Earlier this year,The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and FBI have also warned that AI-driven cybercrime and deepfakes are on the rise.The FBI said, "Criminals are using AI to make cyberattacks and other criminal activities more effective and more difficult to detect."

The "deep fake" videos are not perfect. In some videos, even the mouth shape of "AI Musk" does not match. But some experts say that for some of the target groups of scammers, the videos they produce seem convincing enough and are constantly improving.

In addition, some scams often promote fake artificial intelligence software that can generate a significant return on investment. The scammers use this to lure the target audience into investing only a small amount of money at the beginning (about $250). Later, the scammers continue to claim that the investment will increase in value, and people are often slowly lured into investing more money.

Scammed of life savingsBeauchamp"At this point, I am willing to accept all the criticism and ridicule as punishment for my gullibility," the report submitted to the Better Business Bureau said.

He said he is currently relying on a smaller retirement account and pension that he did not disclose to the scammers, and that he had planned to use the savings to travel around the world.BeauchampHe has reported the case to the local police, but the case is progressing slowly. "My case was put in the queue because there are so many fraud cases everywhere," he said. "I don't have much hope."

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