A new video showing a Television Malta (TVM) news feature about a lottery is manipulated by AI to promote what appears to be a sham lottery.
The minute-long video shows Angelica Farrugia, a newscaster at the state broadcaster’s TV station TVM, presenting the evening news, as she would do on a typical day.
However, the news feature being presented is, unusually, about statistics issued by a lottery in which “hundreds of winners won over a million euro”.
The unnamed lottery had released statistics showing how its app had been downloaded over 40,000 times in the past 24 hours, Farrugia says in the video.
The news feature goes on to present brief clips showing members of the public speaking of their lottery wins.
In one clip, a man praises the app’s interface, saying he registered €7,600 in winnings, after twice depositing funds through the app.
In another, a woman says she came across the app on social media and quickly won the princely sum of €5,300.
The footage used for the scam video appears to have been taken from the evening news broadcast on Sunday February 15.
In the real footage, a standing Farrugia can be seen introducing the main stories of the day, before taking a seat at her desk to introduce the bulletin’s opening feature, an interview with the Prime Minister held earlier in the day.
The manipulated video lifts the footage, replacing the images on the large screen behind Farrugia with videos of the app supposedly in action and screenshots of its download page on Google’s Play Store.
The video was first shared by a since-deleted Facebook page named Xorti (the Maltese word for “luck”) on Tuesday February 17.
Shortly after it was shared, Farrugia herself posted it to Facebook, telling her followers that the clip was manipulated by AI and warning them not to interact with the app promoted in the video.
The clip is only the latest in a long series of manipulated videos using a mixture of real footage and audio deepfakes in the hopes of scamming people out of their funds.
Several prominent figures have been the subject of these videos, including the Prime Minister, several Cabinet ministers and other well-known media personalities.
However, the rapid improvement in AI technology over the past years has allowed scammers to produce ever more realistic deepfakes.
Earlier examples of these scams would typically portray celebrities or political figures promoting a fraudulent scheme in clipped, broken English, making it relatively simpler for discerning viewers to recognise that the footage had been manipulated.
In this latest manipulated video, however, Farrugia speaks in Maltese, as she typically would when presenting a news bulletin. Her tone and vocal cadence is remarkably naturalistic for the most part, only sounding inauthentic during a handful of brief moments.
Fact Check, Society, Technology
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Originally published here.
