The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology to take the faces and images of people in photographs and videos and put them into realistic appearing pornographic videos has been with us since 2017 although until recently it had been primarily used to create deepfake pornographic videos using the faces of famous actresses such as Gal Gadot, Emma Watson, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson. Recently, however, the technology has been used by criminals targeting non-celebrities who are sent the videos by the criminals creating them with a threat to widely circulate the videos unless a ransom is paid.  The FBI has issued a warning about this crime which you can see using this link. https://www.ic3.gov/Media/Y2023/PSA230605#fna

TIPS

Finding videos to use as a basis for stealing the images of celebrities is simple as such videos can be found throughout the Internet.  For ordinary citizens, the videos used to create these deepfake porn videos primarily come from our own social media.  Therefore the best thing you can do to protect yourself is make sure you are using the privacy settings on your social media to limit who can have access to your photographs and videos.  It is always a good idea to limit the accessibility of your videos, photos and personal information on your social media to protect yourself from having that information used to facilitate identity theft.  Also, use caution when accepting friend requests on social media.  Accepting all friend requests is asking for trouble.

If you are not a subscriber to Scamicide.com and would like to receive daily emails with the Scam of the day, all you need to do is to go to the bottom of the initial page of http://www.scamicide.com and type in your email address on the tab that states “Sign up for this blog.”