Tesla CEO Elon Musk has appeared in nearly a quarter of all deepfake scams since late last year, according to deepfake detection software | Photo: Reuters
By Stuart A. Thompson
All Steve Beauchamp wanted was money for his family and he thought Elon Musk could help.
Beauchamp, an 82-year-old retiree, saw a video late last year in which Musk promoted a radical investment opportunity that promised quick returns. He contacted the company behind the pitch and opened an account for $248. Through a series of transactions over several weeks, Beauchamp emptied his retirement account and ended up investing more than $690,000.
Then the money disappeared, into the hands of digital fraudsters who were at the forefront of a new AI-powered criminal enterprise. The scammers had edited a genuine interview with Musk, replacing his voice with a replica using AI tools. The AI was sophisticated enough to alter the minute mouth movements to match the new script they had written for the digital fake. To a casual viewer, the manipulation might have been imperceptible.
“In the photo, that was him,” Beauchamp said of the video he saw of Musk. “Now, I don’t know if it was an AI that made him say the things he was saying. But as far as the photo goes, if someone had said, ‘Pick him out of a line of people,’ that’s him.”
In recent months, thousands of these AI-generated videos, known as deepfakes, have flooded the internet with fake versions of Musk that dupe dozens of potential investors. AI-generated deepfakes are expected to contribute to billions of dollars in fraud losses each year, according to Deloitte estimates.
The videos cost just a few dollars and can be made in minutes. They are promoted on social media, including in paid ads on Facebook, increasing their reach. “It’s probably the biggest deepfake scam in history,” said Francesco Cavalli, co-founder and head of threat intelligence at Sensity, a company that monitors and detects deepfakes.
The videos are often eerily realistic, capturing Musk’s signature stilted cadence and South African accent. Musk was by far the most frequent spokesperson in the videos, according to Sensity, which analyzed more than 2,000 deepfakes.
Sensity found that it appeared in nearly a quarter of all deepfake scams since the end of last year. Among those focusing on cryptocurrencies, it appeared in nearly 90 percent of the videos.
Deepfake ads also featured prominent investor Warren Buffett and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, among others.
Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
It’s difficult to quantify exactly how many deepfakes are circulating online, but a search of Facebook’s ad library for commonly used language promoting the scams uncovered hundreds of thousands of ads, many of which included the deepfake videos. While Facebook has since removed many of them for violating its policies and disabled some of the accounts responsible, other videos remained online and more appeared to appear every day.
YouTube was also filled with fake videos, often using a label suggesting the video was “live.” In reality, the videos were pre-recorded deepfakes.
After former President Donald J. Trump spoke at a Bitcoin conference on Saturday, YouTube featured dozens of videos using the “live” label that showed a pre-recorded deepfake version of Elon Musk saying he would personally double any cryptocurrency sent to his account. Some of the videos had hundreds of thousands of viewers, though YouTube said scammers may use bots to artificially inflate the figure.
YouTube said in a statement that it had removed more than 15.7 million channels and more than 8.2 million videos for violating its guidelines from January to
March of this year, with most of those violating their anti-spam policies.
First published: August 14, 2024 | 10:18 PM IS
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