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AI Incidents

Ottawa Couple Reportedly Loses CA$177,023 After Purported Deepfake Elon Musk Investment Scam

October 1, 2023

A retired Ottawa couple, Doug and Victoria Lloyd, lost CA$177,023 after being lured by a purported deepfake video of Elon Musk promoting a fake investment platform. The deepfake allegedly led to prolonged social engineering, remote access to their computer, and fraudulent cryptocurrency transfers. The couple reportedly suffered major financial loss and ongoing debt. Police say recovery is unlikely.
Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers, unknown-scammer-impersonating-elon-musk
Alleged developer
unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers, unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
victoria-lloyd, investors, general-public-of-canada, general-public, elon-musk, elderly-investors, elderly-individuals, doug-lloyd, canadian-investors, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1276

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.