Deepfake Videos of Barbara O’Neill Allegedly Used in Health Scam Targeting Social Media Users
November 1, 2024
Deepfake videos of Barbara O’Neill, an Australian alternative health advocate banned from giving medical advice, have allegedly been used in fraudulent social media ads promoting false health cures. They include treatments for prostate issues and erectile dysfunction. These manipulated videos have been widely circulated across African countries. The scam directs users to deceptive websites, potentially for phishing or financial fraud. O’Neill has denied involvement.
- Alleged deployer
- scammers-impersonating-barbara-o'neill, unknown-scammers
- Alleged developer
- unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
- Alleged harmed parties
- barbara-o'neill, individuals-with-health-problems, citizens-of-various-african-nations, social-media-users
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/953
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.