The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued a warning about a rising trend in extortion campaigns involving deepfake nudes. Criminals are utilizing readily available artificial intelligence (AI) tools to create explicit deepfakes from innocent photos, and then using them to harass or blackmail individuals.
According to a recent Public Service Announcement by the FBI, there has been an increase in reports from victims whose photos or videos have been altered into explicit content. These altered videos, which may include both adults and minors, are then circulated on social media platforms or pornographic websites.
The emergence of advanced technology has made it easier for almost anyone to create deepfake content that appears to feature non-consenting adults and even children. This alarming trend has led to cases of harassment, blackmail, and sextortion.
In some instances, victims come across the deepfake content themselves, while in others, they are alerted to it by someone else. There are also cases where the malicious actors directly contact the victims. Once this contact is made, one of two scenarios usually takes place. The criminals either demand payment, threatening to share the explicit content with the victim’s friends and family, or they request genuine sexually-themed images or videos from the victim.
Sextortion, a form of blackmail where a threat actor coerces or tricks a victim into sharing explicit content and then threatens to release it unless they are paid or provided with more explicit material, is another growing trend that the FBI has been warning the public about.
Usually, in sextortion cases, victims are manipulated online by individuals pretending to be someone else until they have obtained the explicit images or videos. However, deepfake-powered extortion eliminates the need for this elaborate process, as the fabricated images themselves serve as a means to blackmail the victims.
Deepfakes are created using neural networks, which allow users to fake the appearance or audio of an individual. For visual content, videos are compressed and then rebuilt with a decoder, effectively transposing the face of a target onto someone else’s body while mimicking their facial movements. This technology has been available for some time and has been used to insert the faces of celebrities and other individuals into explicit videos.
The concerning aspect of deepfake technology is its increasing accessibility. Even individuals with limited technical knowledge can now create convincing synthetic content. This accessibility is one of the reasons why the FBI and other organizations are deeply concerned about the rise in deepfake-related crimes.
Once deepfake content is released, victims face significant challenges in preventing its continual sharing or removal from the internet. In the United States, this process can be even more challenging than in the European Union, where GDPR rules mandate service providers to take down specific content upon an individual’s request. However, regardless of the jurisdiction, the experience of being a victim of a deepfake can be distressing for both parents and their children.
To minimize the risk of becoming a deepfake victim and to mitigate the potential fallout, individuals and parents are encouraged to take certain precautions. These include being cautious when posting personal content, understanding the privacy settings on social media accounts, being wary of accepting friend requests from strangers, never sending content to unknown individuals, using complex and unique passwords with multi-factor authentication, regularly searching for oneself online, conducting reverse image searches to identify unauthorized content, and reporting any suspicious activity or deepfake content to the police and relevant social media platforms.
For parents, it is essential to run regular online searches on their children to gauge the extent of their personal information and content available online. Parents should also monitor their children’s online activity and engage in discussions about the risks associated with sharing personal content. Additionally, they should think twice before posting content that reveals their children’s faces.
While the technology behind deepfakes continues to improve, leading to the democratization of extortion and harassment, acting cautiously online can reduce the chances of falling victim to such crimes. Unfortunately, as we navigate the open internet, these challenges serve as a reminder of the risks associated with our interconnected digital world.