Deep Fake Elon Musk Cryptocurrency Scam

The title of this one's a mouthful, and it's an interesting one to pick apart - it includes some of my favourite technologies, one that I think is going to be an important part of our future and the other which I think is a storm in a teacup, and unlikely to disrupt anything of note.

AI, which in the last few years has advanced rapidly with deep learning algorithms, can do some really cool stuff. Deep fakes are a way to make realistic looking videos that are faked. These days you can give a piece of software some video footage or images of someone and have the software superimpose that person's face onto another video. So in effect you can have an actor act out a scene, and then change both the video and audio to appear to be someone else. Or you can give the software video of someone talking, and have it change the words they are saying by manipulating their mouth and facial expressions to match the new audio.

Crypto on the other hand, despite being 10 years old already, does not seem to have gained much traction outside of people creating speculative bubbles as a way to make money, and less scrupulous people creating new cryptocurrencies and NFT collections that are simply scams that trick people into investing their money - money that is then stolen by the creators by withdrawing it and converting it to cash (this is called a rug pull).

The BBC reported last week on an issue happening on YouTube, where there are lots of deep fake videos of Elon Musk telling people to send him cryptocurrency and he'll double it. People are sent to a website such as https://x2usd.net/, which walks them through how to buy and transfer Bitcoin or Ethereum (the two most popular cryptocurrencies).

Of course, when people send the money, rather than doubling it the scammers just keep it - and because cryptocurrencies are usually anonymous, it's hard to track down who's doing this.

What's interesting about these videos is that they're faked live streams - the scammers are pretending that the videos are happening live, and instead just playing back a pre-recorded deep fake video to YouTube as if it's happening in real time. This makes it much harder for YouTube to spot and remove, as they will treat live streams differently to uploaded video files. I couldn't find any deep fakes online, but I was quickly able to find videos purporting to be from Tesla featuring Elon Musk talking about crypto (these are based on a real video chat Elon Musk had with other tech leaders a while ago). I found both historical live streams and ones that were “live” as I was watching (the one I've linked to here has surprisingly since been removed) - and they appeared to be connected to the presumably fake company that's running these scams - “Ark Invest”.

The scammers are also using stolen YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands or millions of subscribers (like this one, which used to be a channel called “easy braid hairstyles” and has now been renamed “Tesla [CEO INC]”). This is something that Google could deal with fairly easily, but sadly they don't seem to care enough to do something about it. Their response to the BBC about these scams is that they remove them as people report them - which, of course, is nowhere near as good as them proactively policing these scams on their platform, which is what they really should be doing to protect their users.