HISPI Project Cerebellum
AI Incidents

Over 400 AI-Driven Scams Reportedly Led to $8M Loss for Australians in 2023

March 1, 2024

In 2023, Australians lost over $8 million to scams involving deepfake videos and fake news articles that falsely endorsed investment trading platforms. Scammers used AI-generated content featuring celebrities to mislead victims, leading to significant financial losses. The National Anti-Scam Centre received over 400 reports of these incidents. One man is reported to have lost over $80,000 in cryptocurrency.
Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-creators, unknown-scammers
Alleged harmed parties
australian-general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/715

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.