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AI Incidents

Deepfake Elon Musk Videos Have Reportedly Contributed to Billions in Fraud

August 14, 2024

Scammers used AI to create deepfake videos of Elon Musk promoting fraudulent investment opportunities. Over time, these scams have reportedly led to billions in investor losses. The deepfakes also use voice cloning technology. They have been distributed on social media and YouTube. In particular, they target the elderly, such as 82-year-old Steve Beauchamp, to invest significant sums. Despite efforts by platforms to remove these videos, the scams continue to proliferate.
Alleged deployer
unknown-deepfake-creators, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
elderly-investors, cryptocurrency-users, online-investors, social-media-users, retirees-seeking-investment-opportunities, steve-beauchamp, elon-musk

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/795

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.