Blind Item #6 - The Imposter Scam

It would be easy to spin this as a cautionary tale: some celebrity slides into someone’s dms on Twitter and starts scamming her. We hear of predators and their confederates targeting their next mark, harassing critics, intimidating victims, but there is a new twist: real time deep fake videos.

Let’s start from the beginning: a woman finds that a famous name with a blue checked account has slid into her dms. Seems innocent enough but as the friendship progresses, there are requests starting with iTunes cards and working up to bigger things. Then there is a calamity, planted drugs, police trouble, frozen bank accounts, and the request for a large amount of money, ostensibly for a lawyer.

Of course, if this was Neve on Catfish, the big question is did you talk to him? Video chat? The assurance is yes, many times. It looks and sounds just like the famous actor.

A bit of googling and you would find that there are a number of impostors out there trying to scam the gullible. It’s an old con, predating celebrity culture and the internet (even the 16th century had Martin Guerre.)

But with the internet age comes advances in technology and those that will take advantage of it. One way to get a blue check is to meet certain requirements, the other is to steal it. An abandoned account with a weak password is a takeover target, and next thing you know, it looks legit enough. Then the scammers start looking for victims to send them bitcoin.

So if the blue ticked big name is a scam, how can the face in video chat look legit? The technology for real time deep fakes is so advanced that all you need is a few photos of the celebrity and it becomes hard to tell it’s a fake. Of course if the scammer has mixed up the image files, then sudden changes in facial hair could become amusing.

I wish this was a one-of case, but if google pulls up results on scams, it means that there are more out there. If others speak up, we can take these scammers down.