The time has come for us to make passwords for identifying each other…
Jokes on you scammers. Can’t deepfake me with a friend’s face if I don’t got any friends to deepfake.
Remember, if it’s truly life threatening, the hospital is going to do the surgery and gouge you for it later.
The time pressure is meant to prevent you from looking into it.
Hang up, call them…. Don’t just hand money over the phone.use an excuse like calling your bank or something
No. This is how you avoid the problem.
“Lemme call you back in 5 because <some excuse>”
If you’d lend them money you’ll have their contact info. Go get a different phone and call them.
You’re not wrong but it’s going to take a long time for “that relative that is calling could be someone else” to be something that people actually think about. Simple to execute your solution but 99% of the people out there won’t even consider the possibility.
“HI we are chased bank and we sent you 40k please give us the codes to Amazon gift cards to pay it back” still works on the elderly. This trick is going to wreak havok among old people.
This was common advice for parents in the 80s and 90s. If someone had to pick me up from school unexpectedly my parents gave them a code word to tell me to let me know it wasn’t a child abduction
according to the TV, child adoption is just an anti-semitic Qanon-adjacent conspiracy theory. No need for passwords! yay!
“Hey, what’s wrong with Woofie?”
Your friend is dead
Fortunately, I hate videocalls and have no reason to use them, so if my friend videocalled me I’d ask what the fuck they were doing and immediately be suspicious.
My first thought would be “wtf? How did WhatsApp get installed” followed by throwing my phone in a lake.
Especially if they were suddenly asking you for money.
Right now deepfakes doesn’t work well when the face is viewed from extreme angles, so you can ask them to slowly turn their face to the side or up/down as far as they can until the face is not visible. It also doesn’t work well when something obstruct the face, so ask them to put their hand in their face. It also can’t seem to render mouth right if you open it too wide, or stick out your tongue.
I base this from a deepfake app I tried: https://github.com/s0md3v/roop . But as the tech improves, it might be able to handle those cases in the future.
Edit: chance that the scammer use a live deepfake app like this one: https://github.com/iperov/DeepFaceLive . It also supports using the Insight model which only need a single well lit photo to impersonate someone.
Right now deepfakes doesn’t work well when the face is viewed from extreme angles, so you can ask them to slowly turn their face to the side or up/down as far as they can until the face is not visible.
or, you know, you can just pickup the phone and call them.
You might not be aware of it, but in India (and SEA), using whatsapp video call is a lot more common than calling using your carrier’s phone service. No one would think twice when receiving a whatsapp video calls there.
I guess that also allows for some ‘benefit of the doubt’ from the point of view of the victim, it’s probably harder to spot artifacts that would be obvious on a TV or monitor screen when the image is v small, and any glitches could be due to the video stream / compression
i am not aware of that, no, but my point is not that the video call itself is suspicious. it is that if you have have a suspicion for whatever reason, normal cell call for a verification is far easier than doing some strange gymnastics the person above suggested (which may or may not work).
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Two things really:
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Unlike in the US, unlimited calls and unlimited sms is not a thing in many countries where WhatsApp is popular. In contrast, WhatsApp calls and messages are free. This was quite significant, especially early on when WhatsApp starting to get popular during the J2ME / Symbian era.
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Now that everyone use it, if you don’t use it you’ll be that one weirdo who don’t use WhatsApp and people may choose to not contact you at all (especially if it’ll cost money to call you). Even businesses and banks have WhatsApp account these days, so not using WhatsApp will inconvenience you if you live where WhatsApp is dominant.
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“I’m not a cat.”
Easy solution: Never give money that’s requested like this. Give the money in person or not at all.
If the friend doesn’t like it they can go to the bank. If they don’t like my terms they can pay interest to them.
Sorry people, I’m not your fuckin loan officer and scams are just too easy.
40,000 Indian rupees = $487 USD.
Wow that’s a cheap surgery! Definitely not US.
Yeah them paying in rupees might have been a hint to where it happened.
Indiana?
Hyrule
“Come back when you’re a little… mmm… richer.”
Hi. I’m calling you about your korok insurance.
With deepfake technology being so advanced nowadays, how will we ever know if the person we are talking with on the internet is who they say they are?
You have to establish a shared password that only you two know, this should be done in person, face to face. Someone needs to make an app for storing passwords for people as opposed to websites. I suppose contact lists could store the password field.
I got one of these a few months ago. I could tell it was fake before I even answered, but I was curious so I pointed my own camera at a blank wall and answered. It was creepy to see my friend’s face (albeit one that was obviously fake if you knew what to look for) when I answered.
How do these scamers know who our friends are? Also how are they able to get pictures or video from said friend to create the fake?
In my case, the friend’s facebook account was compromised. So they were able to get his pictures and call me from his account.
Here’s hoping for popularising secure communication protocols. It’s gonna become a must at some point.
WhatsApp video calls are end-to-end encrypted. A secure protocol means nothing in this context.
But key exchanges work.
Signal for example, will warn you when the person you are talking to is using a new device.
As long as the user heeds the warning, it is an effective stop, and at the very least gives the user pause.
If the signal safety number changes, but the communication stays on track, as in, the context of the conversation is the same, it’s unlikely to be a problem. But if the safety number changes and the next message is asking for money, that is a very simple and easy to process situation.
I’m in the US and have a well off friend who had his Facebook hacked. The bad actors sent messages to his friends asking to borrow $500 until tomorrow because his bank accounts were locked and he needed the cash. Someone who was messaged by the bad actors posted a screenshot of a deepfaked video call he received that caused him to fall for it. Wild times we live in!
I know someone who fell for a similar scam but it involved purchasing gift cards.
I routinely get emails from the owner of the company I work for asking me to kindly purchase several large gift cards and forward them and the receipt to him for prompt reimbursement.
asking me to kindly purchase several large gift cards
kindly give me your money, thanks
Don’t deep fakes always look a little clunky?
Yeah until they don’t anymore lol.
