Barefaced Scams

With OpenAI’s announcement of Sora, many of us are excited about the possibilities it will open up for content creation, and we watch, fascinated, as month after month new advances are made in different uses of Generative Artificial Intelligence.

But the “bad guys”, who, let’s not forget, live without regulations or ethical boundaries, are exploring new ways to turn technology to their advantage.

Which is how we found out that two weeks ago a British multinational was swindled out of 24 million euros using a deepfake on a video call.

What is a deepfake?

We’ll borrow part of the definition from Wikipedia:

[…] Deepfake (ultrafalso in Spanish) is an English blend of the words fake and deep learning. It is an artificial intelligence technique that makes it possible to edit fake videos of people who appear to be real […]

We’ve already seen this technique used by Hollywood to make actors look younger or to bring others back from the dead.

But in the hands of criminals, these video deepfakes, and let’s remember audio ones too, are starting to be used for all sorts of criminal practices.

Recently Spain’s own CNMV (National Securities Market Commission) was forced to issue a statement warning about the use of deepfakes of public figures promoting a dodgy investment outfit, the same people who used the image of our beloved Antonio Resines for these deceptive, fraudulent ends.

Without giving them any publicity, here’s one of the videos they made for this scam, featuring Marta Ortega and the Governor of the Bank of Spain, among others.

▶ Video: Ejemplo de Deepfake - Material para clase (Deepfake example: classroom material)

Although to my taste it’s very “amateur” and could clearly be better, it has led to some people in this country being deceived and scammed.

Sextortion and deepfakes?

Another of the deplorable uses that the unethical use of these technologies has given rise to is the creation of nude and sexually explicit images based on public photographs.

One of the latest victims was the singer Taylor Swift, after a user recently flooded the network formerly known as Twitter with photos of her combined with scenes from pornographic films.

She isn’t the first celebrity to suffer this kind of harassment, and it’s nothing new either, since this sort of mock-up has existed since the dawn of the internet and the arrival of Photoshop.

However, the results are becoming ever more realistic, and there have already been cases of these fakes being used on people who enjoy no fame whatsoever.

Late last year, the press reported a case of this kind of deepfake porn affecting a group of minors in Almendralejo.

Sadly, I predict that we’ll see this technology misused more and more in sextortion cases.

If you’re the victim of this kind of crime, don’t hesitate: REPORT IT. You can use the channels offered by the National Police, the Guardia Civil or the AEPD (Spanish Data Protection Agency)

Won’t somebody please think of the propaganda?

Obviously we weren’t going to escape this technology being used for geopolitical and related purposes. It’s no accident that Disinformation and the Polarisation of society appear among the greatest risks to humanity in both the short and the long term in the Global Risks Report 2024 from the World Economic Forum.

If, with very few resources, you can con people into handing over their money, how could it not be possible to sway public opinion, especially in the run-up to an election?

Recent cases such as the call from President Joe Biden to Democratic voters in New Hampshire urging them to stay away from the polls are fuelling the debate and setting off alarm bells.

Back in 2021, some European politicians were fooled with a deepfake and believed they were talking to an opponent of Putin, and since the start of the armed conflict Russia has used disinformation and the power of deepfakes, like that video in which Zelensky surrendered.

I’m personally fascinated by this subject, and I think it would be worth a whole newsletter of its own, or even a video on my YouTube channel with an expert in the field. Can you recommend anyone you’d like me to interview on this topic in the comments on this post?

So what can we do?

Fortunately, on the other side of technology we also have people who, faced with a threat, research it and fight back.

Here in Spain, for example, we have the IVERES Project, a collaboration between Radiotelevisión Española, the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and other institutions to monitor and detect deepfakes on social media.

Many companies dedicated to detecting this kind of deception are also springing up, and there are open-source projects available for us to start working on our own tools.

Even so, common sense and critical thinking will remain, as with phishing, the main tools for fighting these scams.

Outreach and Awareness from those of us on the technology side will remain essential to combating all the threats that affect society and organisations.

As part of that awareness effort, I’m going to share a video I’ve been using quite a lot lately in my talks at the various forums I take part in.

▶ Video: A Message from Ella | Without Consent

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Originally published on LinkedIn on 23 February 2024.