New York Attorney General Letitia James recently issued an investor alert, warning residents about investment scams using AI-manipulated videos, or deepfakes, intended to deceive potential investors.
The Office of the Attorney General received complaints about videos featuring fake endorsements from celebrities and public figures, including Warren Buffett and Elon Musk, designed to lure people into fraudulent investment schemes.
Scammers use AI tools to alter existing videos of well-known figures, making it appear as though they are promoting investment opportunities. The videos are appearing in social media feeds, digital ads and messaging apps. One such video found on X, formerly Twitter, featured a deepfake of businessman and investor Buffett. In the AI-generated video, Buffet appears to promote a “Bitcoin giveaway” while directing viewers to a related website.
Warren Buffett, chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, at an annual shareholders meeting in 2019. Buffet is one of several public figures whose image is being manipulated by deepfake investment scammers, as warned by New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Johannes EISELE/AFP / Getty Images
Another deepfake video featuring Musk, flagged in a scam alert community group on Facebook, appears to show the SpaceX CEO and X owner promoting a scheme that purports to double a potential investor’s Bitcoin. The video has a QR code that is now blacked out.
“Manipulated videos advertising phony investment scams are spreading like wildfire on social media,” James said. She urged New Yorkers to be cautious and report such content to law enforcement and social media platforms.
Such video can be difficult to spot, but consumers can watch for inconsistencies in video quality, unnatural facial movements or mismatched audio, security software firm Norton told Newsweek.
“However, as AI gets better, some deepfakes are virtually undistinguishable from real videos for the naked eye,” researcher and Norton Security Evangelist Luis Corrons said.
“With investment scams, the message or offer is frequently ‘too good to be true,’ and often the celebrities themselves publish posts where they distance themselves from such events and campaigns [e.g., crypto giveaways]. It is always a good practice to check the public figure’s social media accounts or websites for such posts before investing or participating,” Corrons added.
While TikTok, YouTube, X and Facebook are the most common social networks where investment scam videos are shared, this is not usually where it ends: “Once victims engage in the scam, they are asked to move to other platforms with end-to-end encryption, such as WhatsApp or Telegram, where they’ll receive further instructions,” he said.
The reason this is the case is related to evading detection because “these encrypted messaging platforms…make it harder for law enforcement to track their activity,” Corrons said.
End-to-end encryption, explained Corrons, “means the messages are only visible to the sender and recipient. While this encryption has a number of benefits for personal privacy, it also makes it difficult for authorities to intercept criminal behavior. This makes it challenging for people to identify fraudulent activity, as the scammer may feel more confident operating in secrecy.”
In its own research into this area, Norton has detected deepfake scams manipulating video footage of other prominent figures, such as Michael Saylor, Joe Rogan, Mr. Beast, Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson.
The cost of these deepfake scams is not insignificant. In the previous year, the FBI‘s Internet Crime Complaint Center logged nearly 900,000 complaints, marking a 22 percent increase from the year before. The potential financial losses associated with the complaints amounted to more than $12.5 billion.
