Hello, and welcome back to The Scam Logs. Here, we go over some of the scams out on the wider internet and help you learn how to spot and avoid them.
Today, we’re taking our first look at a type of scam that will become more common. There’s almost no chance we won’t see more scammers trying to use it. And, as such, we’ll be doing several articles on it.
Today, we’ll just introduce the basic concept. Today, we’ll talk about deepfakes. A term you’ve almost assuredly heard before but maybe haven’t had it explained. For those that don’t know what it is, a deepfake is a fake video created using A.I. of a real person. Some A.I. systems are good enough that, if they have enough information about a person (how they sound, how they speak, how they move, how they look), the system can convincingly mimic that person.
Now, I need to stress this: deepfakes can be very convincingly real. The easiest way to fall prey to a deepfake, should you come across one, is to assume that you can easily spot the difference. Almost all scams have an element of exploiting someone’s snap judgments or overconfidence. It’s a very normal thing for someone to more heavily trust their own senses than what someone else tells them. Deepfakes can trick someone’s senses. They can trick your senses.
And the ways scammers can use them are quite varied. One of the easiest is to use a face and/or a voice one trusts to get someone to reveal personal information. If you hear a friend’s voice call you and ask for a password, you might just tell them. If you see a social post from an influential figure asking for some kind of data, you might just supply it.
In part two, we’ll go over some of the nitty-gritty ways you can help protect yourself from deepfakes, but for now, awareness that these things exist is already helpful. If you know a video might not be real, you’re less likely to fall prey to it. If you know that things online can be fake, you won’t trust them automatically. That’s a more potent defense than you might realize. That’s one of the reasons The Scam Logs talks about these things.
