Yahoo Boys Allegedly Employ Real-Time Deepfake Technology in Romance Scams
May 1, 2022
Scammers from Nigeria, known as "Yahoo Boys," are reportedly utilizing real-time deepfake technology to impersonate individuals during video calls, deceiving victims in romance scams. By allegedly altering their appearance with face-swapping software, they build trust under false identities to defraud targets of substantial sums.
- Alleged deployer
- yahoo-boys, scammers-in-nigeria, brouteurs
- Alleged developer
- unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
- Alleged harmed parties
- targets-of-the-yahoo-boys, targets-of-scammers-in-nigeria, targets-of-romance-scams, targets-of-brouteurs
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/911
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.