The Biggest Scammer of All, Owner of X Site, E.Musk

 By Stuart A. Thompson 

The New York Times

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

Mr. Beauchamp, an 82-year-old retiree, saw a video late last year of Mr. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. Musk, replacing his voice with a replica using A.I. tools. The A.I. 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,” Mr. Beauchamp said about the video he saw of Mr. Musk. “Now, whether it was A.I. 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 A.I.-driven videos, known as deepfakes, have flooded the internet in recent months featuring phony versions of Mr. Musk deceiving scores of would-be investors. A.I.-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 Mr. Musk’s iconic stilted cadence and South African accent.

 

Scammers will start with a genuine video, like this interview from The Wall Street Journal conducted by Thorold Barker, an editor whose voice is also heard in the clip.

Mr. Musk’s mouth movements are edited with lip-synching technology, which tweaks how someone speaks. Scammers will add an A.I. voice using voice-cloning tools, which copy any voice from sample clips.

The final ad, which can include fake graphics mimicking news organizations, can be quite convincing for casual internet users._

Source: The Wall Street Journal (original clip)

Mr. Musk was by far the most common spokesperson in the videos, according to Sensity, which analyzed 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.

Mr. 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 responsible accounts, other videos remained online and more seemed to appear each day.

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

‘Live’ YouTube Scams

Search results on YouTube for “Elon Bitcoin conference” showed dozens of supposedly live videos featuring a deepfake Mr. Musk hawking crypto scams. Some videos were watched by hundreds of thousands of people.

YouTube

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.

One Texan said he lost $36,000 worth of Bitcoin after seeing an “impersonation” of Mr. Musk speaking on a so-called live YouTube video in February 2023, according to a report with the Better Business Bureau, the nonprofit consumer advocacy group.

“I sent my bitcoin, and never got anything back,” the person wrote.

 

Source: CNET (original clip)

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.

The prevalence of the phony ads prompted Andrew Forrest, an Australian billionaire whose videos were also used to create deepfake ads on Facebook, to file a civil lawsuit against Meta, its parent company, for negligence in how its ad business is run. He claimed that Facebook’s advertising business lured “innocent users into bad investments.”

Meta, which owns Facebook, said the company was training automated detection systems to catch fraud on its platform but also described a cat-and-mouse game where well-funded scammers constantly shifted their tactics to evade detection.

YouTube pointed to its policies prohibiting scams and manipulated videos. The company in March made it a requirement that creators disclose when they use A.I. to create realistic content.

The internet is now rife with similar reports from people scammed out of thousands of dollars, some of them losing their life savings. Hong Kong’s Securities and Futures Commission issued a warning in May about scams featuring Mr. Musk. Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned Americans that A.I.-powered cybercrime and deepfake scams were on the rise.

“Criminals are leveraging A.I. as a force multiplier” in ways that make “cyberattacks and other criminal activity more effective and harder to detect,” the F.B.I. said in an emailed statement.

Digital scams are as old as the internet itself. But the new-wave deepfakes featuring Mr. Musk emerged last year after sophisticated A.I. tools were released to the public, allowing anyone to clone celebrity voices or manipulate videos with eerie accuracy. Pornographers, meme-makers and, increasingly, scammers took notice.