Description: Scammers from Nigeria, known as "Yahoo Boys," are reportedly utilizing real-time deepfake technology to impersonate individuals during video calls, deceiving victims in romance scams. By allegedly altering their appearance with face-swapping software, they build trust under false identities to defraud targets of substantial sums.
Editor Notes: The Yahoo Boys are reportedly not so much a centralized group as a loosely connected network of individuals and small clusters engaging in cybercrime schemes. In French-language reporting, they are usually referred to as "brouteurs," while in English-language reporting, they are often identified as "Yahoo Boys." While the Yahoo Boys have reportedly been experimenting with deepfake technology since sometime in 2021 or 2022, the incident date of 05/01/2022 is an approximation in reference to their reported use of real-time deepfake technology for romance scams. See Incident 901 for a specific example of how three Yahoo Boys allegedly defrauded a French woman of $850,000 by posing as Brad Pitt. See Incident 912 for information on how they have reportedly been targeting widows. See Incident 913 for information pertaining to their use of AI to allegedly impersonate news organizations to blackmail victims.
Entities
View all entitiesAlleged: Unknown deepfake technology developers developed an AI system deployed by Yahoo Boys , Scammers in Nigeria and Brouteurs, which harmed Targets of the Yahoo Boys , Targets of scammers in Nigeria , Targets of romance scams and Targets of brouteurs.
Alleged implicated AI system: Unknown deepfake apps
Incident Stats
Incident ID
911
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2022-05-01
Editors
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
The compliments start flowing as soon as she answers the video call. "Wow, you so pretty, honey," says the man on the other side of the screen. His video feed shows he's white, with short hair, likely a few years younger than her, and is si…
Variants
A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.