Mumbai Doctor Loses Rs 7 Lakh In Investment Scam; Falls Prey To Mukesh Ambani's Deepfake Video

The Mumbai based Ayurvedic doctor The doctor K K H Patil, was lured by fraudsters via Instagram reel that had Mukesh Ambani endorsing them in a deepfake video.

New Delhi: In the recent case of deepfakes preying on gullible and vulnerable of investors, a 54-year-old Ayurveda doctor from Mumbai's Andheri has lost Rs 7 lakh.

The doctor K K H Patil was lured by an investment scam on instagram that had deepfake video of RIL Chairman Mukesh Ambani. The billionaire in the deepfake video was seemed endorsing a company called 'Rajiv Sharma Trade Group and urged people to join BCF Academy for getting higher returns, reported Times of India.

Between May 28 and June 10 the doctor paid Rs 7.1 lakh in 16 different accounts that the fraudsters had floated. Later when she tried to withdraw a sum of the profit i.e, Rs 30 lakh reflecting in the website, did she realise that she has been cheated, TOI said.

Meanwhile, the police have registered an FIR in this case and are in touch with the bank's nodal officers to block or thwart the money that the doctor had transferred.

The problem of deepfake concerning high profile individuals have become common lately. Last year it was discovered that Infosys founder Narayana Murthy's two new deepfake videos, were being widely shared on social media, purportedly promoting a so-called investing platform “Quantum AI”. In the deepfake video, Murthy was shown claiming that the user of this new tech will be able to earn $3,000 (around Rs 2.5 lakh) on the first working day.

One of the videos showed a morphed version of Murthy claiming to be working on a "Quantum AI" project with tech billionaire Elon Musk.

"Today I want to present our new project together with Elon Musk. Quantum AI is the world’s first quantum computing software developed by my team and Elon’s team with a 94 per cent success rate,” the morphed voice said.

Meanwhile, Zerodha Co-founder and CEO Nithin Kamath also posted a video showing his own deepfake, which was convincing enough to fool users into believing it was Kamath himself.

He said the aim was to highlight the growing threat posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In the video, Kamath’s deepfake speaks about the difficulty in verifying customer identities as digitisation becomes centre stage.

With Agency Inputs