As the line between fact and fiction gets harder to distinguish, online criminals need just two hours to create a realistic, computer-generated “deepfake” product that can ruin someone’s life.
The surge in popularity of hyper-realistic photos, audio, and videos developed with artificial intelligence (AI)—commonly known as deepfakes—has become an internet sensation. It’s also giving cyber villains an edge in the crime world.
Between 2022 and the first quarter of this year, deepfake use in fraud catapulted 1,200 percent in the United States alone. Though it’s not just an American problem.
In the same analysis, deepfakes used for scam purposes exploded in Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom. In the study, the United States accounted for 4.3 percent of global deepfake fraud cases. Meanwhile, AI experts and cybercrime investigators say we’re just at the tip of the iceberg. The rabbit hole of deepfake fraud potential just keeps going.
“I believe the No. 1 incentive for cyber criminals to commit cybercrime is law enforcement and their inability to keep up,” Michael Roberts told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Roberts is a professional investigator and the founder of the pioneer company Rexxfield, which helps victims of web-based attacks. He also started PICDO, a cyber crime disruption organization, and has run counter-hacking education for branches of the U.S. and Australian militaries as well as NATO.
Mr. Roberts said legal systems in the Western world are “hopelessly overwhelmed” by online fraud cases, many of which include deepfake attacks. Moreover, the cases that get investigated without hiring a private firm are cherry-picked.
“And even then, it [the case] doesn’t get resolved,” he said.
The market for deepfake detection was valued at $3.86 billion dollars in 2020 and is expected to grow 42 percent annually through 2026, according to an HSRC report.
Sleight of Hand
Imagine getting a phone call from a loved one, tearfully claiming they’ve been kidnapped. Naturally, the abductors want money and the voice of your family member proceeds to give instructions on how to deliver the ransom. You may be convinced it’s the voice of your beloved on the other end, but there’s a chance it’s not.
Deepfake audio or “voice cloning” scams have spread like wildfire across the United States this year, blindsiding compassionate, unprepared individuals in multiple states. But it doesn’t stop there. Deepfake attacks can arrive in many forms. These clever scams can also pop up as video chats with someone you know.
They can appear as the social media post of a long-time colleague, discussing how a cryptocurrency investment allowed them to purchase the beautiful new home they’re excitedly pointing at in a photo.
“We have lots of cryptocurrency scams,” Mr. Roberts said.
Deepfakes are also used for blackmail. It usually involves the creation of a passable video or photo of the victim in a lewd or compromising situation. Then attackers demand a ransom, lest they distribute the fake to the victim’s coworkers, boss, family, and friends.
Every single one of those examples is already happening. But to create these realistic fakes, criminals need access to material like photos, audio, and video. Unfortunately, these things aren’t hard to get.
“If someone gets into your private photos, in your iCloud, that gives all the sampling, all the technology … to make hyper-realistic fakes,” Mr. Roberts said.
Social media profiles are a treasure trove for criminals looking to create these products. Recovering lost assets and the victim’s reputation can be grim. Roberts noted litigation against cyber crimes is an uphill battle. “It’s long, it’s arduous, it’s drawn out, and it’s emotionally and financially taxing.”
Other AI industry insiders say it’s not just the quality of fakes that are a problem but also the quantity.
“Sooner or later, people will be able to generate any combination of pixels of any type of content. And it’s up to you to filter it,” Alan Ikoev told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Ikoev is the CEO of FameFlow.ai, which creates licensed celebrity and influencer ads. As a pioneer of authorized AI-generated content involving celebrities, he’s all too familiar with the work of his nefarious counterparts.
But to counter these increasingly sophisticated scams, people need to be suspicious of everything they see online. “If they don’t question, then they’re easily convinced,” Ikoev said.
Discerning what’s real or fake online is already challenging. Eighty-six percent of internet users admitted to being hoodwinked by fake news, according to an Ipsos survey of more than 25,000 participants in 25 countries. This is compounded by a recent cyber security study, which revealed nearly half of all internet traffic is now generated by bots.
But it’s not all bad news. Mr. Roberts maintains criminals haven’t caught up with how fast technology is moving forward, which is currently outpacing the “bad actors.” However, vigilance and having a plan are needed to repel or counter deepfake attacks.
Moves and Counter Moves
The rapid advancement of technology in fraud almost evokes nostalgia for the days when internet scams were just an email from a self-proclaimed prince in a foreign land who needed help transferring money. AI has given cybercriminals better tools, but it can also be used against them.
“The development of advanced deepfake detection tools using AI-driven algorithms is crucial to combat this threat. Collaborative efforts among AI developers, researchers, and tech companies are essential for creating robust security measures and raising awareness,” Nikita Sherbina, CEO of AIScreen, told The Epoch Times.
Mr. Sherbina said businesses can protect themselves by doubling down on tech. Essentially fighting digital fire with fire.
“Implement advanced AI-based authentication systems, including voice and facial recognition with multi-factor authentication. Continuous monitoring and analysis of communication patterns using AI algorithms can also help detect and prevent fraudulent activities,” he said.
But for individuals, disrupting or preventing a deepfake scam is simpler.
In the event of a suspected voice clone attack, Mr. Roberts said, “The first thing you do is say, ‘honey, I’m going to call you right back.'”
He noted that scammers will invent an excuse why you can’t call back to verify their identity. Another trick to derail criminals using cloned audio to fake a kidnapping is to ask the caller questions that aren’t in the public domain.
“Have this conversation with your family before it actually happens so they understand what you’re doing,” Mr. Roberts added.
He stressed the importance of not using individual email addresses with full names or numbers relevant to the user’s date of birth. Further, a person should never reuse a login password. Mr. Roberts noted the first thing hackers do when they snag a password is try logging into every possible site to see where else it works.
This includes bank accounts, cloud storage, social media, and more. But while deepfakes have raised the bar high for online scammers, the methods of tracking them down haven’t changed.
“The process doesn’t change. AI is just the content … but the breadcrumbs the criminals left, they’re always the same,” Mr. Ikoev said.
Tracking scammers may be well established, but a clear path for victims to recover lost money is not. Financial scams from deepfakes can range from $243,000 to $35 million, according to one analysis.
One example was a cryptocurrency hustle using a forged likeness of Elon Musk that reportedly cost U.S. consumers around $2 million over six months. Perhaps more troubling is that anyone can create them. Mr. Ikoev explained all someone needs to create a deepfake on their smartphone is a graphics card and to watch a few web tutorials.
“Then you’re good to go,” he said.
World of Possibilities
The timing of the upcoming U.S. presidential election in 2024 is precarious, given the surge in deepfake material. Mr. Roberts said Americans should expect an election race chock full of swindlers wielding an arsenal of deepfakes.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security also expressed concern over the technology’s use, stating: “The threat of deepfakes and synthetic media comes not from the technology used to create it, but from people’s natural inclination to believe what they see.”
Yet Pandora’s box is already open. Earlier this year, videos emerged of U.S. politicians making strikingly out-of-character remarks. One involved Hillary Clinton endorsing Republican presidential candidate hopeful, Ron DeSantis. Another depicted President Joe Biden hurtling angry remarks at a transgender person. According to Mr. Roberts, this is just the beginning.
“It’s going to be used in a lot of political interference,” he said, adding this technology will make the next COVID-level event much worse for the public.
“I’m not talking misinformation as described by the liberal Left. I’m talking about deliberate lies to social engineer the whole world.”
Article cross-posted from our premium news partners at The Epoch Times.
Bypass Big Tech Censors
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.