Reported Deepfake Video Impersonating Mark Carney Used in Nearly $1M Cryptocurrency Scam Targeting Ontario Senior

July 1, 2025

A Canadian retiree, Judy Skene, reportedly lost nearly $1 million after a Facebook ad featuring an alleged AI-generated deepfake video of Prime Minister Mark Carney drew her into a cryptocurrency investment scam. Scammers later persuaded her to liquidate retirement funds, mortgage her condo, and take a credit-card cash advance. The incident raises concerns about the misuse of deepfakes for financial exploitation, highlighting the need for improved AI governance and harm prevention measures. Through contributors—JOIN US—to learn more.

Alleged deployer

scammers-impersonating-mark-carney, scammers, cryptocurrency-scammers

Alleged developer

synthetic-media-generation-technology-developers, synthetic-audio-generation-technology-developers, deepfake-technology-developers, synthetic-video-generation-technology-developers

Alleged harmed parties

targets-of-scams, targets-of-scammers-in-canada, mark-carney, judy-skene, investors, epistemic-integrity, elderly-investors, elderly-individuals, cryptocurrency-investors, elderly-individuals-in-canada

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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.