Suspects Alleged to Have Used Purportedly AI-Generated Videos to Defraud 33 People of Approximately 15 Million Lira in Turkey

January 30, 2026

Turkish authorities have arrested nine suspects accused of using purportedly AI-generated videos to defraud approximately 33 people of 15 million Turkish lira in a coordinated operation across Yozgat, Antalya, Hatay, and Ankara. Six suspects were remanded in custody while three were released under judicial supervision. The specific AI tools used by the suspects are still unknown. Through contributors—JOIN US—to learn more about this incident and its implications on AI governance.

Matched TAIM controls

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

Alleged deployer
synthetic-media-creators, scammers-in-turkey, scammers
Alleged developer
synthetic-video-generation-technology-developers, synthetic-media-generation-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties
targets-of-scams, targets-of-scammers-in-turkey, general-public-of-turkey, general-public, financial-scam-victims, epistemic-integrity

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Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1638

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.

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