Associated Incidents
IN SHORT: A video circulating on social media purports to show disgraced Australian “naturopath” Barbara O’Neill endorsing a cure for prostate problems and erectile dysfunction. But there are clues that the video is a deepfake, advertising multiple scams.
Barbara O’Neill is no stranger to fact-checkers around the world, and Africa Check has previously debunked several health claims from the self-described naturopath.
The latest videos featuring O’Neill appear in a series of popular Facebook posts, including one from November 2024 circulating in South Africa, with over a million views at time of writing. Its caption reads: “Prostatitis will disappear forever! Read the article.”
The video starts with low-resolution footage of O’Neill appearing to say: “Your erection will return and remain strong even after 80 if you take one capsule before bed.”
Numerous other videos using the same audio over different video footage of O’Neill speaking were found circulating in Nigeria, Kenya and Zimbabwe.
But are these true endorsements by the controversial Australian?
O’Neill banned from giving health advice, still used to sell cures and supplements
A quick online search produces a torrent of videos of O’Neill giving talks on alternative treatments and causes of disease. According to Australian health authorities, starting around the late 1990s, she has also provided health advice consultations, written books on health and nutrition, and worked at a number of health “retreats”.
O’Neill was banned from giving any health advice in her home country following a 2018 investigation by the New South Wales Health Care Complaints Commission, which found that she was an unregistered practitioner and posed “a risk to the health or safety of members of the public”. But she has reportedly since continued to attract a large following, including online, where her lecture videos are particularly popular.
Clips from these lectures have since become common advertising material on social media. In early 2024, Vox reported that TikTok accounts were using audio from O’Neill’s lecture videos to sell a wide variety of supplements and miracle cures. These are often vaguely aligned with the ethos of self-healing and tend to equate “natural” with healthy.
Then in August, the Guardian reported that artificial intelligence (AI) tools had been brought into the mix, with torrents of impersonations of O’Neill prompting the speaker herself to warn about the trend in a video clip posted to YouTube. We debunked some of these AI-generated impersonations back in July.
Signs of a deepfake
Deepfakes are usually manipulations of real footage to make it look like someone said or did something they didn’t. Scammers can easily and quickly create these videos to profit from using someone’s identity, especially if realism isn’t a top priority.
These videos fall into that fast-created, unrealistic category of deepfakes. The audio in the videos is noticeably out of sync with the mouth and body movements of the speaker, and sounds unnatural or robotic in some parts. It is sometimes hard to notice these clues if there is loud background music or if the footage is very grainy or pixelated, as is the case with these videos.
But other signs in the context of the posts make it clearer that these are scams. For one, they have not been posted by O’Neill, who has also said she does not have a Facebook page of her own. They are instead posted by a series of small accounts that either do not appear affiliated in any way with the speaker or a wellness business, or can clearly be seen from their Facebook profiles to be running multiple adverts across different languages and linking to a host of different websites.
Finally, as in most health scams, sensational claims about curing something quickly or easily, or promising miracle-level results, are a big giveaway that something is fraudulent.
What scammers want
Some of the latest videos appear as part of multiple Facebook adverts, often by the same accounts. The adverts include links that then direct users to various other unrelated sites, including fake copies of legitimate health websites like Mayo Clinic and Healthline. From these, users are invited to subscribe or sign up, likely as a way to get personal information, in what is called a phishing scam.
Other adverts appeared to be set up to sell products more directly, with similar or identical posts linking to sites purporting to sell impotence-curing gummies called Vital Grow XL.
You can find out more about identifying deepfakes in our guide.