HISPI Project Cerebellum HISPI PROJECT CEREBELLUM

Reported Use of Deepfake Video Impersonating Owen Wilson in Romance Scam with Fake Job Payments

May 16, 2025

In May 2025, a Reddit user shared a concerning incident where her mother fell victim to an AI-generated deepfake video of actor Owen Wilson. The scam originated on the game app 'Yahtzee with Friends', transitioning to WhatsApp voice calls. Scammers used this deepfake video as 'proof' of authenticity, while promising a fraudulent Warner Bros job and small payments via Cash App. Deceitfully, they also claimed to buy a house for the victim's family. This incident underscores the importance of responsible AI governance and harm prevention in AI-powered deepfake technology. To contribute to safe and secure AI practices and map similar incidents to HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM (Govern), JOIN US here
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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-owen-wilson, unknown-scammers
Alleged developer
unknown-deepfake-technology-developers, unknown-voice-cloning-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
unnamed-mother-of-reddit-user-sharp_ad_8771, reddit-user-sharp_ad_8771, players-of-yahtzee-with-friends, owen-wilson, general-public

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1126

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.