HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Alleged Deepfake Investment Scam Uses Economist David Rosenberg's Likeness on Meta Platforms

April 15, 2025

Deepfake technology was allegedly employed by fraudsters to impersonate renowned economist David Rosenberg, promoting a bogus investment scheme through AI-generated content and social media advertisements. Victims were guided towards WhatsApp groups offering misleading stock advice, leading to significant financial losses, some surpassing half a million dollars. The deceptive ads are reported to have been disseminated on Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. Rosenberg and his family have reported the scam to authorities. For those interested in preventing such incidents and upholding trustworthy AI practices, consider joining Project Cerebellum and our efforts to Govern, Map, Measure, or Manage AI incidents.

JOIN US

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers, unknown-scammers-impersonating-david-rosenberg
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
david-rosenberg, syed-hasan, unnamed-woman-who-lost-dollar500000, unnamed-man-who-lost-dollar450000, investors, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1115

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.