HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Scammers Allegedly Use AI-Generated Avatars to Impersonate Friends in Houston, Texas and Solicit Money

September 23, 2024

Two Houston women reported being targeted in an alleged scam involving AI-generated videos that appeared to depict trusted friends. The purported deepfake avatars were reportedly used via social media and messaging apps to solicit access codes and promote fraudulent sales. Victims are reported to have lost control of their accounts, and friends of the impersonated individuals sent money believing the videos were authentic.
Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
stacey-svegliato, sara-sandlin, general-public, general-public-in-houston

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1065

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.