Deepfake fraud has gone \u201cindustrial\u201d, an analysis published by AI experts has said.<\/p>\n
Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams \u2013 leveraging, for example, deepfake videos<\/a> of Swedish journalists or the president<\/a> of Cyprus \u2013 are no longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis from the AI Incident Database<\/a>.<\/p>\n It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of \u201cimpersonation for profit\u201d, including a deepfake video of Western Australia\u2019s premier, Robert Cook, hawking an investment scheme, and deepfake doctors promoting<\/a> skin creams.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> was a video call with company leadership. UK consumers are estimated to have lost<\/a> \u00a39.4bn to fraud in the nine months to November 2025.<\/p>\n \u201cCapabilities have suddenly reached that level where fake content can be produced by pretty much anybody,\u201d said Simon Mylius, an MIT researcher who works on a project linked to the AI Incident Database.<\/p>\n He calculates that \u201cfrauds, scams and targeted manipulation\u201d have made up the largest proportion of incidents reported to the database in 11 of the past 12 months. He said: \u201cIt\u2019s become very accessible to a point where there is really effectively no barrier to entry.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe scale is changing,\u201d said Fred Heiding, a Harvard researcher studying AI-powered scams. \u201cIt\u2019s becoming so cheap, almost anyone can use it now. The models are getting really good \u2013 they\u2019re becoming much faster than most experts think.\u201d<\/p>\n In early January, Jason Rebholz, the chief executive of Evoke, an AI security company, posted a job offer on LinkedIn and was immediately contacted by a stranger in his network, who recommended a candidate.<\/p>\n Within days, he was exchanging emails with someone who, on paper, appeared to be a talented engineer.<\/p>\n \u201cI looked at the resume and I was like, this is actually a really good resume. And so I thought, even though there were some red flags, let me just have a conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n Then things became strange. The candidate\u2019s emails went directly to spam. His resume had quirks. But Rebholz had dealt with unusual candidates before and decided to go ahead with the interview.<\/p>\n Then, when Rebholz took the call, the candidate\u2019s video took nearly a minute to appear.<\/p>\n \u201cThe background was extremely fake,\u201d he said. \u201cIt just looked super, super fake. And it was really struggling to deal with [the area] around the edges of the individual. Like part of his body was coming in and out \u2026 And then when I\u2019m looking at his face, it\u2019s just very soft around the edges.\u201d<\/p>\n Rebholz went through with the conversation, not wanting to face the awkwardness of asking the candidate directly if they were, in fact, an elaborate scam. Afterwards, he sent a recording of it to a contact at a deepfake detection firm, who told him that the video image of the candidate was AI-generated. He rejected the candidate.<\/p>\n