Description: Scammers, allegedly linked to the Yahoo Boys, are using AI-generated news videos to blackmail victims in sextortion schemes. The videos impersonate news organizations, featuring fabricated reports that accuse victims of crimes, including explicit content distribution. Tutorials for creating these clips are reportedly shared on Telegram, with scammers leveraging the fake broadcasts to pressure victims into paying.
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, with these blackmail incidents reportedly beginning in earnest in 2023 and picking up in 2024. The incident date of 01/27/2024 is based off of a WIRED report's publication on the specific vector of impersonating news organizations for the sextortion schemes. Refer as well to the Network Contagion Research Institute's report of 01/30/2024, "A Digital Pandemic: Uncovering the Role of ‘Yahoo Boys’ in the Surge of Social Media-Enabled Financial Sextortion Targeting Minors," available at https://networkcontagion.us/reports/yahoo-boys/. 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. Refer to Incident 551 for more on the FBI having reported a surge of AI-related sextortion cases.
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 Ghana and Brouteurs, which harmed Unnamed victims in sextortion schemes , Teenagers targeted in sextortion scams , News organizations impersonated by scammers and CNN.
Alleged implicated AI system: Unknown deepfake apps
Incident Stats
Incident ID
913
Report Count
1
Incident Date
2025-01-27
Editors
Incident Reports
Reports Timeline
When online romance and sextortion scammers sense they've found a victim who may send them money, they'll use all kinds of villainous methods to get paid. They'll frequently stoop to blackmail---and are constantly creating more devious appr…
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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