Yahoo Boys Allegedly Employ Real-Time Deepfake Technology in Romance Scams

May 1, 2022

Scammers, often referred to as 'Yahoo Boys', are accused of employing real-time deepfake technology to manipulate identities during video calls, orchestrating romance scams. By allegedly using face-swapping software to deceive victims, they build trust under false personas for financial gain. This incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices.

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Matched TAIM controls

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

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.616, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.610, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.607, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: yahoo-boys, scammers-in-nigeria, brouteurs
Alleged developer: unknown-deepfake-technology-developers
Alleged harmed parties: targets-of-the-yahoo-boys, targets-of-scammers-in-nigeria, targets-of-romance-scams, targets-of-brouteurs

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/911

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.