The Guide #189: Your new celebrity best friend? It’s just a deepfake trying to con you
In this week’s newsletter: AI impostors are charming fans out of fortunes – here’s how TV’s Scam Interceptors catch the criminals
This week’s newsletter is written by Nick Stapleton and Mark Lewis, presenter and producer respectively on BBC’s Scam Interceptors. If you haven’t seen Scam Interceptors, it’s a very entertaining factual series in which Nick and his team of ethical hackers attempt to disrupt scamming attacks on the public as they happen. In the show’s fourth series, now airing daytime on BBC One, one of the scams disrupted involves a worryingly convincing Reese Witherspoon deepfake. So we thought we’d ask Nick and Mark to tell us all about their brush with (fake) celebrity, and share some pointers on how to spot a deepfake before it convinces you to empty your bank account. – Gwilym