The Age of Realtime Deepfake Fraud Is Here
“At least now I saw you’re way more gorgeous and more beautiful than you were in the photo you sent me,” an older white man with a greying beard says during a Skype video call. He is talking to an elderly woman who appears to be in her car, staring into her phone’s front-facing camera.
She laughs at the compliment, and the smiling man keeps going. “I think I should send security to keep you safe, so no one comes,” he says. To that, the woman laughs even more. I’ll be okay, she reassures the man.
The bearded man, however, doesn’t really exist. Instead, he is a realtime deepfake created by a fraudster, likely to lure the woman as part of a romance scam and have her send money. Someone filming the interaction captures what is really happening: a young Black man is sitting in front of a laptop and webcam, and software is then automatically transforming his appearance to that of the much older white man and feeding that into Skype, all live.
Other realtime deepfakes from fraudsters include a Black man making himself appear as a white woman, and many cases of scammers being able to hold objects during the live call without breaking the illusion. One deepfake scammer even included an American flag in the background of their live video call.
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