L.A. Woman Reportedly Defrauded of $81,000 and $350,000 Condo Proceeds in Romance Scam Using Purported Deepfake Videos of Actor Steve Burton
October 1, 2024
In October 2024, Los Angeles resident Abigail Ruvalcaba was reportedly targeted in a romance scam using purported AI-generated deepfake videos and voice impersonations of actor Steve Burton. Believing she was in a relationship, she allegedly sent over $81,000 in cash, gift cards, and crypto, then sold her condo for $350,000 and transferred proceeds to the scammer. Her daughter intervened in February 2025, but the family now reportedly faces bankruptcy and legal battles to recover losses.
- Alleged deployer
- unknown-scammers-impersonating-steve-burton, unknown-scammers
- Alleged developer
- unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
- Alleged harmed parties
- steve-burton, general-public, family-of-abigail-ruvalcaba, abigail-ruvalcaba
Source
Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1194
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
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