Description: Yahoo Boys (from Nigeria and Ghana) and scammers from Morocco are reportedly targeting U.S. widows and vulnerable individuals using AI-generated images and fake military profiles in "Artificial Patriot" scams. They have allegedly impersonated military officials such as General Matthew W. McFarlane to gain trust, sharing fabricated backstories and emotional appeals. Once trust is established, they request money through untraceable methods.
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 09/23/2024 is based off of initial reporting on American Patriot scams. See Incident 911 for more general reporting on Yahoo Boys using deepfakes 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 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 from West Africa , Scammers from Nigeria , Scammers from Morocco , Scammers from Ghana and Brouteurs, which harmed Widows , Matthew W. McFarlane , Impersonated American military officials , Emotionally vulnerable individuals and American widows.
Alleged implicated AI system: Unknown deepfake apps
Incident Stats
Incident ID
912
Report Count
2
Incident Date
2024-11-21
Editors
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
Foreign scammers are using artificial intelligence to craft highly convincing fake military profiles, targeting some of the most vulnerable members of society---U.S. widows. These so-called "Artificial Patriots" prey on the emotions and tru…
ATLANTA (InvestigateTV) --- The double-amputee soldier holds a cake and asks for birthday wishes. Patriotic Americans like, comment, and share the post with their followers.
But the soldier isn't real. He was created by artificial intellige…
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.
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