Deepfake fraud 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,”In early January, Jason Rebholz, the chief executive of Evoke, an AI security company, posted a job offer on LinkedIn and was immediately contacted by a stranger in his network, who recommended a candidate,Within days, he was exchanging emails with someone who, on paper, appeared to be a talented engineer.
“I looked at the resume and I was like, this is actually a really good resume.And so I thought, even though there were some red flags, let me just have a conversation.”Then things became strange.The candidate’s emails went directly to spam.His resume had quirks.
But Rebholz had dealt with unusual candidates before and decided to go ahead with the interview.Then, when Rebholz took the call, the candidate’s video took nearly a minute to appear.“The background was extremely fake,” he said.“It just looked super, super fake.And it was really struggling to deal with [the area] around the edges of the individual.
Like part of his body was coming in and out … And then when I’m looking at his face, it’s just very soft around the edges,”Rebholz went through with the conversation, not wanting to face the awkwardness of asking the candidate directly if they were, in fact, an elaborate scam,Afterwards, he sent a recording of it to a contact at a deepfake detection firm, who told him that the video image of the candidate was AI-generated,He rejected the candidate,Rebholz still does not know what the scammer wanted – an engineering salary, or trade secrets.
While there have been reports of North Korean hackers trying to get jobs at Amazon, Evoke is a startup, not a massive player,“It’s like, if we’re getting targeted with this, everyone’s getting targeted with it,” said Rebholz,Heiding said the worst was ahead,Currently deepfake voice cloning technology is excellent – making it easy for scammers to impersonate, for example, a grandchild in distress over the phone,Deepfake videos, on the other hand, still have room for improvement.
This could have extreme consequences: for hiring, for elections, and for broader society,Heiding added: “That’ll be the big pain point here, the complete lack of trust in digital institutions, and institutions and material in general,”The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know,If you have something to share on this subject, you can contact us confidentially using the following methods:The Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories,Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs.
This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said.If you don’t already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS/Android) and go to the menu.Select ‘Secure Messaging’.Our guide at theguardian.com/tips lists several ways to contact us securely, and discusses the pros and cons of each.
Home Office says nearly 60,000 people deported from UK or left voluntarily since 2024 election
Nearly 60,000 unauthorised migrants and convicted criminals have been removed or deported from the UK since Labour took office, the Home Office has said.The announcement came amid claims that the government was promoting “harmful stereotypes” by equating migration with criminality.Officials said the figure was the highest number in a decade.The department said 15,200 people who were in the UK illegally were removed since the 2024 election – a 45% increase on the previous 19 months.A statement said 43,000 people left voluntarily after being told they were in the UK illegally
No 10 defies calls to sack Morgan McSweeney over Mandelson appointment
Downing Street has defied calls to remove Keir Starmer’s most senior aide, insisting Morgan McSweeney retains the prime minister’s confidence, as frustration grows over a wait for documents on Peter Mandelson, which some fear could last for weeks.Amid warnings from Labour backbenchers that McSweeney’s survival would leave Starmer’s position “untenable”, Starmer apologised to victims of Jeffrey Epstein for appointing Mandelson, a close friend of the convicted child sex offender, as US ambassador.A day after a chaotic Commons deal to release vetting papers over Mandelson’s appointment left many Labour MPs mutinous, there was still fury about the role of McSweeney, the PM’s chief of staff.One Labour MP said: “People want [McSweeney] to go, more than ever before. The current situation is unsustainable
How the Epstein scandal has shaken the British government to its core
It was the one scandal that Donald Trump seemed unable to shake. No matter his best efforts to convince his supporter base that there was nothing to see here, the demands for the administration to release every document it had on the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein only grew.Yet even after the most shocking revelations in the latest drop about Trump’s inner circle – involving everyone from Elon Musk to the Maga honcho Steve Bannon to the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, not to mention Trump himself – so far, it seems, the administration has escaped largely unscathed. Nobody has resigned, nobody has been fired, and certainly there is no sign that the US president is going anywhere.There is, however, one political establishment that the Epstein scandal has shaken to its core – in the UK, where revelations in the files have sent a shock wave through the governing party that threatens to topple it entirely
Calls to halt UK Palantir contracts grow amid ‘lack of transparency’ over deals
Labour should halt public contracts with the US tech company Palantir, opposition politicians have said, amid growing concern at the lack of government transparency over dealings with the company and Peter Mandelson.Since 2023, Palantir has secured more than £500m in contracts with the NHS and the Ministry of Defence (MoD), while it employed Global Counsel, the lobbying firm founded by Mandelson. Emails released by the US Department of Justice show Mandelson sought help from Jeffrey Epstein to find “rich individuals” as clients.The government has for months blocked attempts by MPs and campaigners to scrutinise Palantir’s deals. Requests for information about meetings between the company’s leadership with Keir Starmer and the former prime minister Boris Johnson were among those that have been refused
‘If someone had pulled the trigger’: MPs rue lack of challenger to oust Starmer
The most dangerous moment of Keir Starmer’s premiership came just after lunchtime on Wednesday, when mutiny was the talk of the Commons tea room.Anger is widespread across Labour – but it was at its most palpable among the party’s new MPs, as the Conservatives used a humble address to force the disclosure of the vetting documents and communications linked to Peter Mandelson, disgraced by his close association with Jeffrey Epstein.“At about 2pm yesterday, if someone had pulled the trigger, we would have moved,” one 2024 intake MP said on Thursday. “No one dared. I think that says a lot
Lord Triesman obituary
The wide-ranging diversity of the employment and pursuits in the packed public life of David Triesman, Lord Triesman, who has died aged 82, was fuelled by a visionary idealism he first displayed as a teenage schoolboy and which he thereafter sustained throughout a rollercoaster ride in sport, business and politics.He began his working life as an academic, spent nearly two decades as a trade union leader, ran the Labour party as general secretary for two years in the troubled run-up to the Iraq war from 200103 and then became a government minister in the House of Lords. A qualified senior football referee who had played for Tottenham Hotspur’s youth team in the 1960s, he served as chair of the Football Association from 2008 to 2010. He remained an active member of the Lords and numerous public bodies, and in 2011 founded his own consultancy dealing in property and private equity.In a letter he wrote from Labour’s headquarters as general secretary in 2003, he sought to re-engage the political commitment of disaffected party members, after the early shine of the Blair government was dimmed with disillusion, by defining his own lifelong fervour for a fairer world
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