A St. Petersburg woman is facing charges after reporting to police she was attacked and sharing an AI-generated image of the suspect.<\/p>\n
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. \u2014 What started as a frightening 911 call turned out to be completely fake.<\/p>\n
St. Petersburg police say a woman who claimed a stranger broke into her apartment and attacked her made up the story \u2014 and even created a fake suspect image using artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Last month, officers responded to a reported break-in at the apartment of 32-year-old Brooke Schinault.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe victim, now suspect, had shown proof of images of a person that she didn\u2019t know and had entered her home forcibly and possibly injured her getting inside of her house,\u201d said Ashley Limardo, public information officer with the St. Petersburg Police Department.<\/p>\n
Investigators say forensic teams and a K-9 unit searched the area but found no suspect.<\/p>\n
A few hours later, Schinault\u2019s boyfriend called police back, saying she hadn\u2019t told them everything. When officers returned, Schinault claimed she had also been sexually assaulted.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s when a detective was called to the scene and immediately became suspicious of the photo Schinault provided.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat detective immediately saw the proof, or the evidence, she provided and immediately knew this was part of a TikTok trend that we\u2019re seeing online,\u201d Limardo said.<\/p>\n
According to police, investigators later found the AI-generated image saved in Schinault\u2019s deleted files \u2014 created days before she ever called 911.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a waste of resources. We had officers go out to this home twice in one day,\u201d Limardo said.<\/p>\n
Limardo said creating fake pictures like the one Schinault used isn\u2019t difficult. It can take just a few minutes with AI software.<\/p>\n
\u201cEven though we suspect it\u2019s false, we\u2019re still going to handle it as if we believe it\u2019s a real case, go through the process and the evidence until we have proof it\u2019s not,\u201d Limardo said.<\/p>\n
Police say Schinault is now charged with two misdemeanors and is currently out on bond.<\/p>\n
10 Tampa Bay News reached out to Schinault for comment, but the phone number she gave police is disconnected.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A St. Petersburg woman is facing charges after reporting to police she was attacked and sharing an AI-generated…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":33406,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[202,204,203,199,201,200],"class_list":["post-33405","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-st-petersburg","tag-st-pete","tag-st-pete-headlines","tag-st-pete-news","tag-st-petersburg","tag-st-petersburg-headlines","tag-st-petersburg-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33405","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33405"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33405\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33405"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33405"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33405"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}