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Guelph, Ontario, Woman Reportedly Lost $14,000 in Purported Deepfake MrBeast Cryptocurrency Scam

May 5, 2026

A resident of Guelph, Ontario reported a significant financial loss estimated at $14,000 due to a suspected deepfake cryptocurrency scam involving the popular YouTube personality, MrBeast. The woman claimed she clicked on a social media advertisement for an investment opportunity in cryptocurrency, which was allegedly linked to the creator. Her losses reportedly accumulated from her initial $250 payment and subsequent transfers made after speaking with individuals she believed were representatives of the YouTube star, including $5,000 sent to a crypto wallet.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers, unknown-scammers-impersonating-mrbeast
Alleged developer
deepfake-technology-developers, synthetic-audio-generation-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
unnamed-guelph-ontario-woman, general-public, fans-of-mrbeast, epistemic-integrity, youtube-users, social-media-users

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1485

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

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