(The Epoch Times)—Increasingly hard-to-detect deepfake content created with artificial intelligence (AI) is being exploited by criminals to impersonate trusted individuals, the FBI and the American Bankers Association (ABA) said in a report published Sept. 3.
In its Deepfake Media Scam infographic, the FBI said that scams targeting Americans are surging. Since 2020, the agency has received more than 4.2 million reports of fraud, amounting to $50.5 billion in losses. “Imposter scams in particular are on the rise … Criminals are using deepfakes, or media that is generated or manipulated by AI, to gain your trust and scam you out of your hard-earned money.”
Deepfake content can include altered images, audio, or video. Scammers may pose as family or friends, or as public figures, including celebrities, law enforcement, and government officials, it warned.
“Deepfakes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and harder to detect,” said Sam Kunjukunju, vice president of consumer education for the ABA Foundation.
According to the infographic, certain inconsistencies in the AI-generated material can help detect deepfakes.
When it comes to images or videos, people should watch out for blurred or distorted faces, unnatural shadows or lighting, whether audio and video are out of sync, whether the teeth and hair look real, and whether the person blinks too little or too much. In the case of audio, people should check whether the voice tone is too flat or unnatural.
The infographic listed three red flags of a deepfake scam—unexpected requests for money or personal information, emotional manipulation involving urgency or fear, and uncharacteristic communication from what appears to be a known individual.
To remain safe, ABA and FBI advised Americans to think before responding to emotional or urgent requests, and create code words or phrases to confirm the identities of loved ones.
“The FBI continues to see a troubling rise in fraud reports involving deepfake media,” said FBI Criminal Investigative Division Assistant Director Jose A. Perez.
“Educating the public about this emerging threat is key to preventing these scams and minimizing their impact. We encourage consumers to stay informed and share what they learn with friends and family so they can spot deepfakes before they do any harm.”
According to an Aug. 6 report by cybersecurity company Group-IB, the global economic impact of losses from deepfake-enabled fraud is estimated to hit $40 billion by 2027.
“Stolen money is almost never recovered: Due to rapid laundering through money‑mule chains and crypto mixers, fewer than 5 percent of funds lost to sophisticated vishing scams are ever recovered,” it said.
Vishing, a short form of voice phishing, refers to scammers impersonating authority figures such as government officials, tech support, and bank employees to dupe targets and steal money.
According to Group-IB, deepfake vishing relies heavily on emotional manipulation tactics. Targets of such scams include corporate executives and financial employees.
Elderly and emotionally distressed individuals are also vulnerable to deepfake vishing tactics due to their limited digital literacy and unfamiliarity with artificial voice tech, it added. As such, scams involving impersonation of familiar-sounding voices may have a bigger impact on these individuals.
In June, an elderly deepfake scam incident came to light involving a Canadian man in his 80s losing more than $15,000 in a scheme that used a deepfake of Ontario Premier Doug Ford.
In the scam, Ford was depicted promoting a mutual fund account, which the victim saw via a Facebook ad. When the victim clicked on the ad, a chat opened up convincing him to invest the money.
In June, Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) introduced the bipartisan Preventing Deep Fake Scams Act, which aims to tackle the threat posed by such fraud.
The bill seeks to address AI-assisted data and identity theft or fraud by setting up an AI-focused task force in the financial sector, it added.
“Scammers are using deep fakes to impersonate victims’ family members in order to steal their money,” Husted said.
“As fraudsters continue to scheme, we need to make sure we utilize AI so that we can better protect innocent Americans and prevent these scams from happening in the first place. My bill would protect Ohio’s seniors, families and small business owners from malicious actors who take advantage of their compassion.”
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.