elections misinformation fake News identity theft these are some of the terms that have been associated with social media scams over the years the prominence of artificial intelligence has also exposed new trends of scamming social users such as deep fake AI this is an online intelligence used by unscrupulous cyber criminals to manipulate and generate a trusted source's voice and images to commit fraud and scam on unsuspecting victims but for more on reputational risks involved with deep fake II and how unsuspecting social media users can protect themselves and how they are being caught out so badly we
joined in Studio by Professor Stephen Sudley who's a professor of practice from the Johannesburg business school at the University of Johannesburg and Chad Thomas he's the chief executive officer at the IRS forensic investigations uh gentlemen it's great to have you thanks very very much for joining us on morning live thank you for having us yeah you know it's it's it's such a an important conversation that we're about to have here because we talk about fake news and many people think of it as ah just an article that's come up that's not true and we just
move on but it's not like that it is getting more and more sophisticated and this is now going into people's lives and ruining their lives perhaps you want to talk to us about the difference between fake news and deep fake and all of these kind of things that are around okay so so the goal the gold standard of trustability has always been at least in the last century photographs and later on video if you could see it you could believe it and the die was costing Photoshop came out in the early 90s where you could
change pixels and airbrush people's faces it has indeed become more and more sophisticated to the point today where you can insert photographs into unfamiliar environments or environments that they weren't shot in where you can shoot video and get the lips to move and here's the problem again I saw the one that you were hit with that was a particularly bad job if you spent a few seconds looking at that video you could tell it wasn't you but I have seen stuff now that is not only unreco unrecognizable as fraud people talking but also unrecognized to
technology so one has to accept the fact that the stuff is out there and except for one thing which perhaps we can talk about in the moment you will not be able to see that the video is fraudulent yeah in fact let's play one because they now seem to be trying to get them even better I mean for those for those viewers that are not too aware of this which it'll surprise me if you're not because the amount of people that approach me on a daily basis to ask me personally about you know I've become
a victim of of these scams where you know my face is on diet pills it's on investment schemes and every day there's something new but the Deep fake AI videos that we're talking about here's one this one was from a few days ago so have a listen to this perhaps I mean you know my voice you listen to it every morning but here it is but this is a deep fake version of me advertising something so here we go take a listen hello ladies I want to tell you about a new product that has already
helped thousands of women around the world active keto gummies is revolutionizing the weight loss industry many users report losing up to 23 pounds in just three weeks and they're finally regaining their figures this supplement Works primarily as a fat burner treat yourself to the Stars treatment yes they got the tone the accent is completely wrong but if you if you just click on that and you're not necessarily sort of looking closely you think but there's a video there's a story there's a website I can buy this and I can lose all this weight the hey
I'm gonna buy it but your money goes so I mean talk to me about this I mean let's let's bring you into the conversation Chad I I mean these kind of things how prevalent are they exceptionally so um when one looks at Deep fake one looks at AI meets CGI we know that it's it's a problem that's going to just increase increased straight into the stratosphere we've had people cloning people's social media accounts we've had people actually steal people's social media accounts through manipulation why are they doing that it's to create a revenue stream for
a criminal or for criminal syndicates so if they can use your likeness and your reputation your brand to further their fraud they will do so now obviously it's a tough grave concern not just in respect of the scams that are taking place but also in respect of evidence that's going to be presented in court at a later stage in respect of genuine CCTV footage or Genuine recordings because all of this is now going to be scrutinized so we're as courts in the past have relied very heavily on photographic evidence CCTV Etc with all of this
deep fake and taking place and AI meeting CGI you're going to have very clever defense attorneys questioning genuine footage and it's going to be very difficult for the experts to prove otherwise the more sophisticated this becomes and one must understand that AI is constantly learning it's finding what mistakes it's been made and it's trying to remedy those mistakes to become as perfect to the reality as possible yeah so how do we help ourselves because at the end of the day social media is not helping us and perhaps before we talk about how we can help
ourselves maybe we can talk about social media for a moment because I I see a lot of fake things whether we talk about Facebook Instagram Tick Tock all of these kind of things you report it so they give you the option to report these things as scams or fake but this has been reported over and over and over again but it's still it's still there Facebook's done nothing about it tick tock tells you that um they that this user is not violating any of their rules but they are impersonating a person who happens to be
me who has reported it but they do nothing about it these social media Giants I'm very worried about them because they seem to be aware and they do nothing about it do you have a comment on that perhaps yeah the the uh the volume of fake stuff they're disappearing not only photographs news all of the other things appearing on social media is far too large for Facebook or any of the social medias to do anything about they're taking the position as we're a neutral neutral media platform we're not responsible for what's on here the volume
exceeds the ability of Courts and the law to handle it by many orders of magnitude so our solution is not going to be found in complaining to the people who platform the stuff yeah it's too big there is there is a real solution to the stuff so if if I may I'm just going to talk about it perfect please the solution to that stuff and the only solution to that stuff surprisingly lies in cryptography and that is that a digital signature photography digital signature is attached to the footage at the moment it's created and it
can't be changed and it's already being built into cameras I think Sony is the first one with a with the digital signature standard so if you take a picture of somebody it attaches a signature and later on if somebody tries to do manipulation it can't do it yeah and there are many organizations working on that solution yeah so so that could be one thing that's coming to prevent it but that's in that's in the future unfortunately yeah we're going to have a whole lot of trouble when until that becomes a global standard and I mean
we've we've we've seen this at play and we see massive cases I mean we just saw you know we see with the elections we saw this happen with the U.S elections and the manipulation of I mean I'll just take the the whole issue with the Donald Trump and the and the Clinton and we saw all of that taking place with Bill pottinger and all of these kind of things but it does manipulate the way people think and people lose a lot through this what repercussions do the victims of this actually have so I talk about
both parties those that have lost money that have gone and given all of the information their money is now been taken do they have any chance of getting that money back A and B the person who is being manipulated the let's take myself for instance what what do we have we have incredible legislation in South Africa we have the Cyber Crimes Act which was propagated last year December that act is now in full force it also has a component to it that talks about fraud and how a person can be defrauded within that cyberspace the
problem is with all this incredible legislation we need people that are able to investigate and prosecute those kind of crimes and with South Africa being at an all-time high in respect of contact crimes and other related crimes it's very difficult to have enough trained Personnel on the ground that are going to be able to investigate this also if you think about it because these crimes are sophisticated from a technological perspective would you go to a charge office to lay a charge and you try to explain this to a person behind the charge office desk that
person may not necessarily understand technology it's going to be very difficult and frustrating for a complainer to be able to have a case registered have a case escalated and have a specialized unit investigated also of course it's compounded by by the sheer volume of these cases that are now doing the rounds yeah indeed and that's and that's the problem you may report it you may but but where do you get and the bottom line is is that your bank's not going to help you uh I mean if you've if you've gone and sort of transferred
money into an account that is usually shut down so quickly and they move on once they've got your money there's no way you're going to get that back no the worst one of the worst cases I've heard you've talked about some of the the financial scams but there are also Financial scams which are both based on emotional scams and they have a much longer lasting effect the worst that I've heard is something that's happening now in the United States and Mexico where the the voice of a child has been cloned and the mother's phone rings
and it's the child screaming that she's been kidnapped and also screaming as though she's being hurt at that moment and within seconds that mother is clearly going to transfer as much money as it takes and it is at this stage Unstoppable and one has to just rely on on the on the the power of the Court says as you talked about shared over here to show examples um of of convicting people and the goodness of man and I'm afraid my faith is somewhat shaken in the goodness of man with with the tsunami of the stuff
that's happening now and and you're right about that because people are there are there there are voices and faces behind this I mean I I'll again I mean it's easy for me to speak on an example because of what's been happening with my identity and what's been going on I mean there are people operating call centers they they are Manning email addresses they are phoning you back they are having full conversations with people about their money and how much money they're going to make and how amazing it is and then when you phone them back
they disappear and you can never track them down or Trace them yeah and and this is the problem they know what they're doing they are scamming you out of thousands tens of thousands and yet they just do it like you say your faith in humanity is is and it's amazing many people will steal without blinking with shame I didn't think that was evident before I saw this yeah it is true but what do we look for because that's now where we're at so it's getting bigger it's getting worse it is out there all the time
how do we protect ourselves and educate ourselves to the fact that what is real and what is not real understand that the targets are generally people who are not tech savvy they are generation it's our generation that have been targeted because we didn't grow up with a smartphone when we were 12. we weren't Adept at the changes and from a technological perspective that the answers of today are and the generations that have come after us so we are being targeted specifically because of our status within Society we have most probably worked we most probably have
a small nest egg and we need to be very wary of people that are offering our stuff and you always hear that that expression I'm not going to repeat it if it's too good to be true it's too good to be true because we've repeated this so many times the fact remains is you spoke about call centers we call them boiler rooms they started in the 80s they were selling penny stocks in the states they've now become this Beast worldwide where people call you they're exceptionally confident they're exceptionally convincing that's where the term con artist
comes from and they are so confident and they also convincing that they are not offering you a huge amount of return on your investment they're offering you a better return on investments and the way in which they're structuring it they seems to be some or other truth to it and one must always understand when there's something that we call a Black Swan event taking place be it covert be it the invasion of Ukraine anything that goes against what is expected in the world they will use this as an opportunity to monetize their scams and we
always have to be very aware of people that are coming out during those times so for example with you with the invasion of Ukraine we saw a lot of people internationally suddenly selling sunflower oil yes because we'd knew there'd be a shortage with covert we saw the PPE phenomenon in South Africa which became one of the biggest frauds ever perpetrated suddenly everybody was involved in the buying and selling of masks if you went on to your social media your best friends who you were never in the medical field were selling masks but they didn't know
they were an extension of fraud they thought they had got a good deal and they were now going to sell to their client base you know those masks never existed it's unbelievable and and we fall for this but I mean are there simple things to look out for for me I mean I I would look at I'd look at the the URL so I I have a look at that I mean you know many of them have taken reputable news agencies and written this entire article about how things work on a news 24 template or
a times live template or a sweat and template these are just the ones that I've seen and then stuck them on websites addresses that have never heard of like handsomefishermen.com or you know whatever it may be and these websites just keep on changing uh all the time is that a sign to look out for in terms of url url isn't it's an obvious one if if but many people don't look at you they click on the picture and they're they're into the content before looking at the top so as Chad said and as you mentioned
before education is incredibly an important mitigating Factor but the fact is you can't educate everybody and even if you can't you can those people are going to find a way around that so if if I can say as as just a dollop of optimism for your viewers is technology got us here and I do believe that technology will get us out of this as well yeah I hope so because that is a that is a dollop of of of confidence in this but just a final closing point and I and I heard what you were
saying that the social media companies you know it's hard for them because there are so many but I'm not buying into that I don't think I can buy into that because you know sometimes you can open up an account you don't have to put an ID number in you can be anonymous I could make a fake name and I create a fake account and then I go and wreak havoc in people's lives should this be allowed in this day and age anonymity when you are dealing on social media platforms that they know are stealing people's
identities stealing livelihoods and destroying lives should this be allowed surely the blame also has to in a way lie with all of these social media Giants we never read the t's and C's which just click approve and accept all there's a program currently on Netflix called Black Mirror and the very first is Joan is awful yeah and it shows you where Ai and CGI come together and the devastating consequences thereof we have to be very careful we have to take it upon ourselves we can't rely on third parties to protect us anymore especially in the
cyber world we've clicked on those t's and C's there's no way we could hold meta or X or any of these huge organizations responsible should we be defrauded we have to be tech savvy we have to learn or else we shouldn't be on those social media platforms wow all right read the t's and C's and they long you click yes and there's just like streams and reams of small print I don't know anyway be careful out there be careful out there everybody Professor Steven sidley professor at practice at the Johannesburg Business School uh University of
Johannesburg thank you and Chad Thomas CEO of IRS forensic investigations talking to us about the worry and prevalence of online scams and deep fake AI that is really causing a lot of people some damage out there
