HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

New Zealand Financial Markets Authority (FMA), Te Mana Tātai Hokohoko, Reportedly Flags Purported Deepfake Pump-and-Dump Network Using Social Media Ads

August 19, 2025

The New Zealand Financial Markets Authority (FMA), Te Mana Tātai Hokohoko, has reportedly warned of a potential threat involving an AI-enabled 'pump-and-dump' scam. The scheme is believed to have used purported deepfake videos of prominent New Zealand business leaders in Facebook and Instagram ads to attract investors into fake WhatsApp investment groups. The modus operandi involved luring victims to buy low-value foreign shares, which were then artificially inflated in price. A follow-on 'recovery' scam was used to defraud the victims.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
unknown-scammers-impersonating-new-zealand-business-leaders, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
investors, impersonated-new-zealand-business-leaders, general-public-of-new-zealand, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1227

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.