Deepfake fraud has gone “industrial”, according to an analysis published by AI experts from the AI Incident Database.
The analysis warns that tools to build tailored, personalised scams using deepfake videos of Swedish journalists or the president of Cyprus are no longer niche but dirt cheap and easy to deploy at scale.
It catalogued more than a dozen recent examples of “impersonation for profit”, including a deepfake video of Western Australia’s premier, Robert Cook, flogging an investment scheme and deepfake doctors punting skin creams.
These examples sit within a broader trend in which scammers use widely available AI tools to conduct increasingly targeted heists with minimal effort.
Last year, a finance officer at a Singaporean multinational paid out nearly $500,000 to scammers during what he believed was a video call with company leadership.
UK consumers are estimated to have lost £9.4bn (€11.0bn) to fraud in the nine months to November 2025.
MIT researcher Simon Mylius said, “Capabilities have suddenly reached that level where fake content can be produced by pretty much anybody”.
He calculates that “frauds, scams and targeted manipulation” have made up the largest proportion of incidents reported to the database in 11 of the past 12 months.
“It’s become very accessible to a point where there is really effectively no barrier to entry,” he said.
Harvard researcher Fred Heiding said: “The scale is changing. It’s becoming so cheap that almost anyone can use it now. The models are getting really good – they’re becoming much faster than most experts think.”
In early January, Evoke’s chief executive, Jason Rebholz, posted a job opening on LinkedIn and was quickly contacted by a stranger in his network who recommended a candidate.
Within days, he was swapping emails with someone who, on paper, looked like a talented engineer.
Rebholz said, “I looked at the resume, and I was like, this is actually a really good resume. And so I thought, even though there were some red flags, let me just have a conversation.”
Then it became unusual, with the candidate’s emails going straight to spam and the resume showing inconsistencies that did not quite add up.
Rebholz had dealt with unusual applicants before, so he went ahead with the interview anyway.
When Rebholz took the call, the candidate’s video took nearly a minute to appear.
Rebholz said: “The background was extremely fake,” he said. “It just looked super, super fake. And it was really struggling to deal with [the area] around the edges of the individual. Like part of his body was coming in and out … And then when I’m looking at his face, it’s just very soft around the edges.”
He continued, avoiding the social awkwardness of calling it out mid-conversation, then sent a recording to a contact at a deepfake detection firm.
The contact informed him that the candidate’s video image was AI-generated, so Rebholz rejected the application.
Rebholz still does not know what the scammer wanted, whether it was an engineering salary or access to trade secrets.
There have been reports of North Korean hackers attempting to obtain jobs at Amazon, but Evoke is a startup, not a major player.
Rebholz said: “It’s like, if we’re getting targeted with this, everyone’s getting targeted with it.”
Heiding thinks the nastiest bit is still to come, with deepfake voice cloning already excellent and primed for impersonation scams like a grandchild in distress over the phone.
Deepfake videos are improving too, and once they stop glitching, hiring, elections, and everyday online life will get much messier.
Harvard researcher Fred Heiding said: “That’ll be the big pain point here, the complete lack of trust in digital institutions, and institutions and material in general.”
