Blackmail failed, hackers put victims in porn videos

According to Yahoo News, On April 21, Owen, living in Singapore, was woken up by a strange phone call with a foreign number. He picked up the phone because he thought it was his manager. However, the other end of the line did not speak.

After hanging up, he received a message on the Line app from someone named Lori, which included a screenshot of his contact list. This person said he had hacked into his contacts and threatened to send his pornographic videos to his friends if he didn’t transfer him 8,000 SGD (132 million VND).

The blackmailer also advised Owen not to call the police as “it will only make us angrier and your reputation will be further damaged”.

“Just pay a small fee, we will remove the footage and do not disturb further,” the hacker messaged. Owen ignored the threat, thinking it was a scam.

Hours later, hackers sent a pornographic video, in which his face was grafted onto the protagonist, to Owen’s friends. “They asked me if I recognized the person in the video. I had to wash my face to sober up. They said Owen was participating in a sex trafficking service but did not pay,” his friend said. Many of Owen’s friends and former colleagues said they also received similar videos.

Owen immediately informed the police. The next day, a number of other people also encountered the same blackmail technique. Experts say that video hackers use to blackmail victims is a form of deepfake.

With the advancement of AI, bad guys can put anyone’s face into a video that ordinary people can hardly distinguish what is real and what is fake. Deepfake is a combination of “deep learning” and “fake”. The first deepfake videos are released Reddit 2017, which featured celebrities swapping faces into high school movie stars.

According to statistics of Sensity, of more than 14,000 deepfake videos posted, up to 96% are pornographic videos. CNN quoted Giorgio Patrini, CEO and chief scientist of Deeptrace, that videos with false content often go viral very quickly. “Even when many deepfakes don’t look real, viewers are still affected by perception. This is an ominous threat to social networks,” Patrini said.

Much of the deepfake content that Deeptrace finds is from pornographic websites, including one that provides users with deepfake movies with female actors whose faces are replaced by certain celebrity images. All are advertised.

Online platforms like Facebook or Google have repeatedly warned of the risk of deepfakes being widely distributed on social networks. So they created deepfakes in the hopes of helping researchers find ways to combat fake content.

Khuong Nha (according to Yahoo News)