HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Purported Unauthorized Deepfakes of Norman Swan and Others Circulated in Online Supplement Campaigns

May 21, 2025

In 2025, deepfake scam ads impersonating Norman Swan and other public figures were widely circulated on Meta platforms, promoting unverified health supplements. These campaigns employed voice-cloned videos and various deceptive tactics, potentially causing financial and health harm. The businesses behind these ads were reportedly linked to entities in Australia and New Zealand through deceptive redirects and alias branding. This incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices and the need for governance and guardrails for AI, such as those provided by Project Cerebellum's TAIM (Govern) function.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
unidentified-actors-linked-to-vellec-group-nz-ltd, unidentified-actors-linked-to-healthy-life-choices-nz-ltd, unidentified-actors-linked-to-apex-united-pty-ltd
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
rebel-wilson, public-trust-in-medical-guidance, norman-swan, jonathan-shaw, general-public-of-australia, australians-with-chronic-health-problems, adele

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1076

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.