HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Financial Times Journalist Martin Wolf Reports AI-Generated Investment Scam Using His Likeness on Instagram and Facebook

March 9, 2025

In March 2025, deepfakes purportedly impersonating Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf were circulated via ads on Facebook and Instagram, promoting a fraudulent investment group. Despite repeated takedown attempts, the ads reportedly persisted under new accounts. Preliminary data suggests at least 1,700 ads reached over 970,000 users in the EU alone. The impersonations allegedly used AI-generated visuals and voice clones to mimic Wolf's likeness and mislead unsuspecting users. This incident underscores the need for trustworthy AI and effective governance mechanisms, such as those provided by HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Measure). Join us in shaping safe and secure AI practices: JOIN US
HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM focuses on mapping, measuring, and managing incidents like this one to foster responsible AI and AI governance.

Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers, unknown-scammers-impersonating-martin-wolf
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
martin-wolf, financial-times, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1113

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.