Today, hundreds of deepfakes have started showing up on dating apps. According to the Daily Beast, in 2019, a woman from California was scammed out of about $900,000 after being led on by manipulated clips. The elaborate scheme involved two scammers (or one fraudster who used two different accounts). The first criminal she met on the online dating site pretended to be Sean Buck, U.S. Navy vice admiral and the superintendent of the Naval Academy. The woman talked to him on Skype regularly. The second scammer posed as an American who, after months of communication, told her that he had been imprisoned overseas. The woman asked “Buck” to help to release the prisoner, and “the admiral” made her transfer thousands of dollars “to pay the lawyer.” Later law enforcement discovered that every time the victim spoke to “Buck” on Skype, she was actually watching “manipulated clips of preexisting publicly-available video of the real Admiral Buck”.
There might be many more cybercrimes using deepfakes—not all of them seem to be reported since victims might be embarrassed about being scammed. Besides universal recommendations not to answer video calls from strangers and avoid sending them money, experts have specific tips on how to recognize deepfake videos and protect yourself from cybercrime. As the FBI pointed out in its March warning , look for too much space between the subject`s eyes, visual distortions around pupils and earlobes, syncing issues between face and lip movement, and a blurry background on the video.
The proliferation of deepfakes have prompted myself and my team to introduce a detector system that will be available online at BurstPixel . The website will help you detect deepfakes Photos and Videos in minutes just by uploading it. It does not end there, we also developed Scamcatchersapp for you to report scams.
Detect Deepfakes at www.burstpixel.io
Report Scams at www.scamcatherapp.com