Sinister elements have been embracing AI to achieve their evil machinations and also to harm the image of influential people, Prime Minister Modi and Google’s Boss to name a few.
A digital risk management firm, Athenian Tech (AT), has raised alarm over a fast-growing wave of AI-powered financial fraud across India in a deeply unsettling revelation. Its report, titled “False Endorsements, Real Losses,” lays bare how sophisticated deepfake technology is being weaponised not just to steal money, but to systematically hijack the credibility of the country’s most recognisable faces.
The early beginnings. The fraud didn’t get started quietly. The first known wave was a deepfake video of Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google who was presented as the face of a platform called “Google Invest,” and was pitched to unsuspecting viewers as a government-backed venture offering astronomically high returns. It was no accident that the face of the big boss of the global technology giant, was used as a bait to lure unsuspecting individuals. The use of the deepfake of Mr Pichai was a calculated ploy to bypass scepticism and provide instant legitimacy to unsuspecting investors, especially those who were hungry for reliable opportunities.
The plot thickens. The next move was yet more on your face. The sinister elements behind the campaign the malicious campaign, cloned the Times of India website with near-perfect fidelity. An attempt to ride on the goodwill of one of India’s most trusted media houses to promote a fraudulent platform called “Go Invest.” To gather more legitimacy the nefarious souls even used the image of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, in the cloned website to promote their evil designs. In effect, the perpetrators copied the appearance of a credible media publication that even the most vigilant of users would have difficulty discerning the deception at first glance.
Behind the façade. The investigation then uncovered perhaps its most alarming finding. The same criminal ecosystem produced a deepfake video of the Union Finance Minister Ms Nirmala Sitharaman, depicting her as an advocate of yet another fictitious scheme called “InvestGPT.” That India’s Union Finance Minister, a person responsible for driving the economic policy and ensuring national fiscal authority, too fell prey to deepfakes is a disturbing escalation in ambition and audacity of the bad elements in cyber space.
Kanishk Gaur, CEO of Athenian Tech, warns that these campaigns follow a dangerous and common playbook: steal a trusted face, clone a credible platform and flood social media with content that appears to be real. The result is a scalable fraud machine that moves fast and is extraordinarily hard to detect for the common user.
The implications, of such campaigns, reach far beyond the loss of money. If citizens can’t be sure that a video of their own Prime Minister or their Finance Minister is for real, then the damage to the credibility of institutions is a threat in itself – one that lasts longer than any individual scam.
