Incident 683: Scammers Using Deepfakes of Women's Faces and Voices for False and Offensive Advertisements

Description: Scammers used AI tools from HeyGen and ElevenLabs to create deepfake videos of influencers Michel Janse, Olga Loiek, Shadé Zahrai, and Carrie Williams, misusing Lana Smalls's voice in Williams's case. These videos promoted offensive products and false messages, in some cases targeting nationalist Chinese men to boost China-Russia ties, causing emotional distress and damaging the victims' reputations.

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Alleged: HeyGen and ElevenLabs developed an AI system deployed by Unknown scammers, which harmed Olga Loiek , Michel Janse , Lana Smalls , Carrie Williams and Shadé Zahrai.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

683

Report Count

Incident Date

2024-03-28

Editors

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

AI hustlers stole women’s faces to put in ads. The law can’t help them.

washingtonpost.com

This ‘Russian Woman’ Loves China. Too Bad She’s a Deepfake.

nytimes.com

washingtonpost.com · 2024

Michel Janse was on her honeymoon when she found out she had been cloned.

The 27-year-old content creator was with her husband in a rented cabin in snowy Maine when messages from her followers began trickling in, warning that a YouTube comm…

nytimes.com · 2024

The woman declares, in Mandarin inflected with a slight accent, that Chinese men should marry "us Russian women." In other videos on the Chinese short video platform Douyin, she describes how much she loves Chinese food, and hawks salt and …

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.