Chinese Businessman Reportedly Defrauded of 4.3 Million Yuan by AI-Generated Deepfake Impersonating Friend

April 15, 2023

A deepfake scam in China led to a businessman losing 4.3 million yuan ($612,000) after an AI-generated video call impersonated a trusted friend.

The fraudster manipulated the friend's face and voice, convincing the victim to transfer funds for a supposed business transaction. The incident underscores the need for responsible AI governance and harm prevention strategies in deepfake technology. For those interested in shaping the future of trustworthy AI, join us at HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM where we Govern, Map, Measure, and Manage AI incidents to foster safe and secure AI practices.
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Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
scammers-impersonating-friend-of-guo, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
guo-(surname-of-deepfake-scam-victim), friend-of-guo-(surname-of-deepfake-scam-victim), general-public-of-china

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/992

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.