Toronto man loses life savings to Justin Trudeau deepfake scam

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A Toronto man says he lost $12,000 after being scammed by a fake cryptocurrency scam that used Justin Trudeau's image to support a fraudulent investment platform.

The scam was spread via a YouTube video and manipulated with artificial intelligence and voice cloning technology to make it appear that Trudeau was promoting a cryptocurrency exchange and investment platform aimed at "helping Canadians safeguard their future." financial".

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"I thought, 'It has to be legit, it has to be perfect.' If not, how could you get the prime minister? So I thought, 'It's got to be official,'” Stephen Henry said. CTV.

Henry initially invested $250, but then continued to invest his savings, believing his investments had increased to more than $40,000 in value.

When Henry tried unsuccessfully to withdraw some of his money, he realized he had been scammed.

“Now they have stripped me of all my possibilities of making a life. That was all the money I had,” she said.

Henry is far from alone. Scams that exploit images of politicians and celebrities to trick people have increased alongside improvements in the quality and accessibility of deepfake technology.

Taylor Swift, Pope Francis and the Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky These are just a few examples of people whose image has been co-opted in deepfake scams and disinformation campaigns.

The scams manipulate artificial intelligence and voice cloning technologies to create highly convincing but fraudulent endorsements. Artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms can superimpose faces and imitate voices, including replicating gestures and vocal patterns.

Even ads with low credibility can be effective, especially for those unfamiliar with advances in AI technology.

Facebook users may have recently seen an ad on the platform featuring a fake Justin Trudeau promoting a cryptocurrency scam.

The fake ad uses footage from a CBC interview, but Trudeau speaks with an Australian accent.

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"One characteristic of scams is that they have to be realistic enough to catch someone, but also fake enough that the people they catch move on (falling into the trap)," said McGill University assistant professor, Aengus Bridgman, to the National Post previously. month.

While Bridgman said Trudeau's ad was poorly done, it also served a purpose by filtering out more experienced users in an effort to attract people who might be more likely to invest money in the scam.

"That's the type of person you want to target with these ads: someone who is not digitally savvy; similarly, seniors in Canada are falling prey to phone scams and identity theft," Bridgman said.

The Prime Minister's Office, through Press Secretary Jenna Ghassbeh, acknowledged the challenges posed by deepfake technology and the proliferation of false information targeting elected officials in a statement to CTV.

“The amount of misleading, false and misleading information and accounts targeting elected officials is increasingly concerning and unacceptable, particularly in an era with deepfake technology,” Ghassbeh said.

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As the federal government strives to keep up with technological advances, it says educating communities and promoting critical engagement with information are key strategies for protection.

"Social norms and discourse around deepfakes must be boosted to create a social environment where people are not only more skeptical about what they see, but are also encouraged to challenge the informational claims of others," he says. he Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS).

Some technology companies and social media platforms use a combination of human insights and automated methods to detect deepfakes, while also pushing to create legal frameworks that can hold deepfake creators and distributors accountable and offer protection to victims of defamation. .

"To alter social norms, opinion leaders and those most central to social networks are key," adds CSIS. “Educational resources, including digital literacy training, are useful tools, especially if they are aimed at influencers. Videos explaining political deepfakes have been found to reduce uncertainty and, in doing so, can increase trust in the media. But norms only really change through collective action.”

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