Purported Deepfake-Based Facebook Impersonation Reportedly Targets Daughter of Scot in Coma

November 26, 2025

Scammers reportedly created a fake Facebook profile impersonating Teigan McMahon, a Scottish woman whose father is in a coma in Turkey. The account used her photos, posts and potentially deepfake-generated content to solicit donations, forcing the family to halt their legitimate fundraiser while the fake profile remained active.

This incident highlights the need for safe and secure AI practices, particularly in the realm of deepfakes. It also underscores the importance of Project Cerebellum's AI governance efforts. By joining us at JOIN US, you can help shape the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM to prevent such incidents and ensure trustworthy AI.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.575, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 6.2 — similarity 0.559, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.556, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: unknown-scammers
Alleged developer: unknown-image-generator-developer, unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties: teigan-mcmahon, peter-mcmahon, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1287

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.