Reported Deepfake of Maltese Prime Minister Robert Abela and Journalist Mark Laurence Zammit Used to Promote Fraudulent Investment

February 17, 2025

AI-generated audio was allegedly used to mimic Maltese Prime Minister Robert Abela and journalist Mark Laurence Zammit, falsely representing them as promoting a fraudulent investment scheme. The deepfake video manipulated authentic interview footage from 2022, replacing the original dialogue with AI-generated voices.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
scammers-impersonating-robert-abela-and-mark-laurence-zammit, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers, unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
robert-abela, mark-laurence-zammit, general-public-of-malta, general-public, epistemic-integrity

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/935

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.