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https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/06/deepfake-taking-place-on-an-industrial-scale-study-finds>
"Deepfake fraud has gone “industrial”, an analysis published by AI experts has
said.
Tools to create tailored, even personalised, scams – leveraging, for example,
deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus – are no
longer niche, but inexpensive and easy to deploy at scale, said the analysis
from the AI Incident Database.
It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of “impersonation for profit”,
including a deepfake video of Western Australia’s premier, Robert Cook, hawking
an investment scheme, and deepfake doctors promoting skin creams.
These examples are part of a trend in which scammers are using widely available
AI tools to perpetuate increasingly targeted heists. Last year, a finance
officer at a Singaporean multinational paid out nearly $500,000 to scammers
during what he believed was a video call with company leadership. UK consumers
are estimated to have lost £9.4bn to fraud in the nine months to November 2025.
“Capabilities have suddenly reached that level where fake content can be
produced by pretty much anybody,” said Simon Mylius, an MIT researcher who
works on a project linked to the AI Incident Database.
He calculates that “frauds, scams and targeted manipulation” have made up the
largest proportion of incidents reported to the database in 11 of the past 12
months. He said: “It’s become very accessible to a point where there is really
effectively no barrier to entry.”
“The scale is changing,” said Fred Heiding, a Harvard researcher studying
AI-powered scams. “It’s becoming so cheap, almost anyone can use it now. The
models are getting really good – they’re becoming much faster than most experts
think.”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
