L.A. Woman Reportedly Defrauded of $81,000 and $350,000 Condo Proceeds in Romance Scam Using Purported Deepfake Videos of Actor Steve Burton

October 1, 2024

In October 2024, a Los Angeles resident, Abigail Ruvalcaba, fell victim to a romance scam involving purported AI-generated deepfake videos and voice impersonations of actor Steve Burton. Believing she was in a relationship, she reportedly lost over $81,000 and her condo worth $350,000. This unfortunate incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

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Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers-impersonating-steve-burton, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
steve-burton, general-public, family-of-abigail-ruvalcaba, abigail-ruvalcaba

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1194

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.