With AI videos getting better and better, more scammers are turning to celebrity deepfakes to trick their victims. One of the latest examples is a man in Springfield, Ohio who fell for a Jelly Roll video declaring he had won a new car. While the victim was skeptical at first, he eventually fell for the scheme.
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That man says he received a message on Facebook which appeared to be from Jelly Roll’s official account. The rapper supposedly wanted to gift him $50,000 and a new car, but there was a catch: he had to cover the shipping cost for the vehicle.
Already, there should be alarm bells going off in your head. If a celebrity is going to give someone a car and cash, which as we’ve covered does happen sometimes, they’re not going to ask for any money to cover shipping costs or anything else.
But the second big red flag was the scammer asked the guy to pay for the car’s transport using Apple gift cards. Criminals love gift cards because they can’t be tracked like other monetary transactions.
What really gets us is the guy at first wasn’t convinced after the first video of Jelly Roll declaring he was a winner, reports WDTN. The scammer then sent an image of what was supposedly Jelly Roll’s driver’s license – why would a celebrity share that information with anyone?
When that didn’t work, the scammer sent a second deepfake video in which Jelly Roll said the victim’s full name. That convinced the guy to send $70 in gift cards.
He was going to send more money when a family member stopped him, saying the whole thing was clearly a scam.
You might want to laugh at this victim, but you too could fall prey to a deep fake scam one day. After all, scammers are using technology to sound like family members of victims, not just celebrities. One big tell is the gift card thing. Another is just the bizarre nature of the situation.
It’s always best to take a step back, assess the situation without applying emotion, then make a decision.
Image via jellyroll615/Instagram
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