Martin Lewis impersonated in deepfake scam ad
Occurred: July 2023
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A deepfake advert impersonating UK MoneySavingExpert founder Martin Lewis attempted to extort people of money by encouraging them to invest in an Elon Musk-backed project.
The 'ad' shows a deepfake of Mr Lewis sitting in his office talking about an investment in 'Quantum AI', which is labelled as Elon Musk’s new project. A picture of Musk accompanies the video.
'Musk’s new project opens up great investment opportunities for British citizens. No project has ever given such opportunities to residents of the country,' Lewis supposedly said in the video.
Per the BBC, Lewis successfully sued Facebook in 2018 over fake ads in his name, with the social media company making a GBP 3m donation to Citizens Advice.
Deepfake
Deepfakes (a portmanteau of 'deep learning' and 'fake') are images, videos, or audio which are edited or generated using artificial intelligence tools, and which may depict real or non-existent people. They are a type of synthetic media.
Source: Wikipedia 🔗
Operator: Meta/Facebook; XCorp/Twitter
Developer:
Country: UK
Sector: Media/entertainment/sports/arts
Purpose: Defraud
Technology: Deepfake - audio, video; Machine learning
Issue: Impersonation; Mis/disinformation
Page info
Type: Incident
Published: July 2023