Scammers Are Using Deepfake Videos Now

Highly realistic deepfake videos didn't quite make the splash some feared they would during the 2020 presidential election. Nevertheless, deepfakes are causing trouble--for regular people. In March, the Federal Bureau of Investigation warned that it expected fraudsters to leverage "synthetic content for cyber … operations in the next 12-18 months." In deepfake videos, which first appeared in 2017, a computer-generated face (often of a real person) is superimposed on someone else. After the swap, the fraudsters can make the target person say or do just about anything.