Incident 786: Fraudsters Use Deepfake Video of Tim Cook to Promote Apple Crypto Scam on YouTube

Description: Fraudsters repurposed an old interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook using AI or video editing to promote a fake crypto event on YouTube. The altered video was designed to mislead viewers into believing Tim Cook endorsed a new cryptocurrency scheme. The stream attracted tens of thousands of viewers, potentially exposing them to the scam before it was removed for violating YouTube’s terms of service.

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Alleged: Unknown deepfake technology developers developed an AI system deployed by Unknown deepfake creators and scammers, which harmed Tim Cook , Apple , YouTube viewers , Cryptocurrency investors and General public.

Incident Stats

Incident ID

786

Report Count

Incident Date

2022-09-07

Editors

Daniel Atherton

Incident Reports

Reports Timeline

Tens of thousands of viewers watched a fake Apple crypto scam on YouTube

theverge.com

Fraudsters Promote Apple Crypto Scam on YouTube, Seemingly Endorsed by Tim Cook

bitdefender.com

theverge.com · 2022

Someone on YouTube was live streaming an old interview with Tim Cook that was seemingly being used to attract attention to a crypto scam --- and when it was live, tens of thousands of viewers were tuning.

If you've seen crypto scams on YouT…

bitdefender.com · 2022

Apple's Far Out event, where it announced the new iPhone 14 and many other new devices, was immediately used to promote a crypto scam on YouTube.

Hijacking important events to promote or trick people into participating in crypto scams is be…

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.