How ‘Deepfake Elon Musk’ Became the Internet’s
Biggest Scammer
An A.I.-powered
version of Mr. Musk has appeared in thousands of inauthentic ads, contributing to
billions in fraud.
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 line up,’ 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 copies any voice
from sample clips.
The final ad, which
can include fake graphics mimicking news organizations, can be quite convincing
for casual internet users.
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 accounts that were responsible, other videos remained online and more seemed
to appear each day.
YouTube was also
flooded with the fakes, often using a label that suggests the video is “live.” In
fact, the videos are prerecorded deepfakes.
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 send my bitcoin,
and never got anything back,” the person wrote.
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.
“It’s shifting now
because organized crime has figured out, ‘we can make money at this,’” according
to Lou Steinberg, the founder of CTM Insights, a cybersecurity research lab. “So we’re going to see more and more of these fake attempts to
separate you from your money.”
The A.I.-generated
videos are hardly perfect. Mr. Musk can sound robotic in some videos and his mouth
does not always line up with his words. But they appear convincing enough for some
targets of the scam — and are improving all the time, experts said.
Such videos cost
as little as $10 to create, according to Mr. Cavalli from Sensity.
The scammers — based mostly in India, Russia, China and Eastern Europe — cobble
together the fake videos using a mix of free and cheap tools in less than 10 minutes.
“It works,” Mr.
Cavalli said. “So they’ll keep amplifying the campaign,
across countries, translating into multiple languages, and continuously spreading
the scam to even more targets.”
Some of the scams
often advertise phony A.I.-powered software, with claims that they can produce incredible
returns on an investment. Targets are encouraged to send a small sum at first —
about $250 — and are slowly lured into investing more as scammers claim that the
initial investment is increasing in value.
In one video, taken
from a shareholder meeting at Tesla, the deepfake Mr. Musk explains a product for
automated trading powered by A.I. that can double a given investment each day.
Experts who have
studied crypto communities said Mr. Musk’s unique global fanbase of conservatives,
anti-establishment types and crypto enthusiasts are often drawn to alternative paths
for earning their fortunes — making them perfect targets for the scams.
“There’s definitely
a group of people who believe that the secret to wealth is being hidden from them,”
said Molly White, a researcher who has studied crypto communities. They think that
“if they can find the secret to it, then that’s all they need.”
Scammers often target
older internet users who may be familiar with cryptocurrency, A.I. or Mr. Musk,
but unfamiliar with the safest ways to invest.
“The elderly have always been a very scammable,
profitable population,” said Finn Brunton, a professor of science and technology
studies at the University of California, Davis, who is an expert in the crypto market.
He added that the elderly had been targets of fraud long before platforms like Facebook
made them easier to scam.
Mr. Beauchamp, who
is a widower and worked until he was 75 as a sales representative at a company in
Ontario, Canada, came across an ad shortly after joining Facebook in 2023. Though
he remembers seeing the video live on CNN, a spokeswoman for CNN said Mr. Musk had
not appeared for an interview in years. (The New York Times could not identify a
video matching Mr. Beauchamp’s description, but he said his story was nearly identical
to that of another woman scammed online by a deepfaked
Mr. Musk.)
He sent $27,216
last December to a company calling itself Magna-FX, according to emails between
Mr. Beauchamp and the company that were shared with The New York Times. Magna-FX
made it seem like his investment was increasing in value. At one point, a sales
agent used software to take control of Mr. Beauchamp’s computer, moving funds around
to apparently invest them.
To withdraw the
money, Mr. Beauchamp was told to pay a $3,500 administration fee and another $3,500
commission fee. He sent the money only to be told that he needed to pay $20,000
to release a portion of the funds — about $200,000. He paid that, too.
Though Mr. Beauchamp
told the scammers that he had exhausted his retirement savings, maxed out his credit
cards, tapped a line of credit and borrowed money from his sister to invest and
pay the fees, the scammers wanted more. They asked him to pay yet another fee. Mr.
Beauchamp contacted the police.
Most traces of Magna-FX
were taken offline, including the company website, phone number and email addresses
used by the agents Mr. Beauchamp spoke with. Another company bearing a nearly identical
name and advertising similar services did not respond to requests for comment.
“I guess now is
the time to call me dumb, stupid, idiot and what other superlatives you can think
of,” Mr. Beauchamp wrote in a report filed to the Better Business Bureau.
Mr. Beauchamp said
he was managing to pay his bills using a smaller retirement account that he had
not shared with the scammers, along with his pensions. He had planned to travel
the world during his retirement.
Mr. Beauchamp filed
a report with the local police but little movement has been made on the case, he
said.
“Because of the
amount of fraud that is going on everywhere, my case got put in a queue,” he said.
“I’m not getting my hopes up.”