Purported Deepfake Impersonation of Elon Musk Used to Promote Fraudulent '17-Hour' Diabetes Treatment Claims

December 27, 2025

A deepfake video falsely attributed to Elon Musk promoted an unverified '17-hour' diabetes cure. The misleading content appeared as part of a scam ecosystem, highlighting the need for trustworthy and safe AI practices. Rapper Boosie Badazz unwittingly amplified the video before its authenticity was questioned.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.569, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.563, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
GOVERN 6.2 — similarity 0.559, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: unknown-scammers-impersonating-elon-musk, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer: unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers, unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties: social-media-users, people-with-diabetes, people-seeking-medical-advice, general-public, epistemic-integrity, elon-musk, boosie-badazz

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1317

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.