HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Purported Deepfake of Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake Promotes Alleged Fraudulent Government Investment Scheme

June 18, 2025

A deepfake video, reportedly manipulated from a May 3rd Satana TV program and voice-cloned into English, shows Sri Lankan President Anura Kumara Dissanayake endorsing a supposed government investment plan. The video, confirmed as AI-generated by Sri Lanka CERT, journalists, and the Presidential Media Division, also includes a fabricated Daily Mirror news article to attract potential investors. This incident underscores the need for trustworthy AI governance, harm prevention, and safe and secure AI practices.

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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-anura-kumara-dissanayake, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
government-of-sri-lanka, general-public-of-sri-lanka, epistemic-integrity, daily-mirror-of-sri-lanka, anura-kumara-dissanayake

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1140

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.