How deepfake version of Elon Musk became internet's biggest scammer

Deepfake videos cost just a few dollars to produce and can be made in minutes. they are promoted on social media, magnifying their reach

By Stuart A Thompson

All Steve Beauchamp wanted was money for his family. And he thought Elon Musk could help.

Beauchamp, an 82-year-old retiree, saw a video late last year of Musk endorsing a radical investment opportunity that promised rapid returns. He contacted the company behind the pitch and opened an account for $248. Through a series of transactions over several weeks, Beauchamp drained his retirement account, ultimately investing more than $690,000.

Then the money vanished — lost to digital scammers on the forefront of a new criminal enterprise powered by artificial intelligence. The scammers had edited a genuine interview with Musk, replacing his voice with a replica using AI tools. The AI was sophisticated enough that it could alter minute mouth movements to match the new script they had written for the digital fake. To a casual viewer, the manipulation might have been imperceptible.

“I mean, the picture of him — it was him,” Beauchamp said about the video he saw of Musk. “Now, whether it was AI making him say the things that he was saying, I really don’t know. But as far as the picture, if somebody had said, ‘Pick him out of a lineup,’ that’s him.”

Thousands of these AI-driven videos, known as deepfakes, have flooded the internet in recent months featuring phony versions of Mr. Musk deceiving scores of would-be investors. AI-powered deepfakes are expected to contribute to billions of dollars in fraud losses each year, according to estimates from Deloitte.

The videos cost just a few dollars to produce and can be made in minutes. They are promoted on social media, including in paid ads on Facebook, magnifying their reach. “It’s probably the biggest deepfake-driven scam ever,” said Francesco Cavalli, the co-founder and chief of threat intelligence at Sensity, a company that monitors and detects deepfakes.

The videos are often eerily lifelike, capturing Musk’s iconic stilted cadence and South African accent. Musk was by far the most common spokesperson in the videos, according to Sensity, which analysed more than 2,000 deepfakes.

He was featured in nearly a quarter of all deepfake scams since late last year, Sensity found. Among those focused on cryptocurrencies, he was featured in nearly 90 percent of the videos.

The deepfake ads also featured Warren Buffett, the prominent investor, and Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, among others.

Musk did not respond to requests for comment.

It is difficult to quantify exactly how many deepfakes are floating online, but a search of Facebook’s ad library for commonly used language that advertised the scams uncovered hundreds of thousands of ads, many of which included the deepfake videos. Though Facebook has already taken down many of them for violating its policies and disabled some of the accounts that were responsible, other videos remained online and more seemed to appear each day.

YouTube was also flooded with the fakes, often using a label that suggests the video is “live.” In fact, the videos are prerecorded deepfakes.

After former President Donald J Trump spoke at a Bitcoin conference Saturday, YouTube hosted dozens of videos using the “live” label that showed a prerecorded deepfake version of Elon Musk saying he would personally double any cryptocurrency sent to his account. Some of the videos had hundreds of thousands of viewers, though YouTube said scammers can use bots to artificially inflate the number.

YouTube said in a statement that it had removed more than 15.7 million channels and over 8.2 million videos for violating its guidelines from January to 

March of this year, with most of those violating its policies against spam.