Fake Albanese videos lead a surge in AI investment scams in Australia
Australia's corporate watchdog says deepfake videos of the PM and other public figures helped fuel a near-tripling of scams it had to take down this year.
What happened: Australia's securities regulator, ASIC, says it dealt with more than 19,400 scams in the past financial year, almost triple the year before, as fraudsters increasingly use AI-generated video and audio to fake endorsements from real public figures. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is the most impersonated: one widely shared clip splices real prime ministerial footage with fake audio promising a $4,000 investment can turn into $40,000 a month, falsely branded as government-backed. Economists, journalists and politicians including Alan Kohler, Jacqui Lambie and Gina Rinehart also appear in fake clips. Scamwatch says the top ten impersonated figures alone are linked to $7.4 million in reported losses.
Why it matters: These aren't crude cut-and-paste fakes — they splice real footage with generated audio and sit inside whole fake ecosystems: fabricated news articles, fake reviews, spoof websites and scripted follow-up calls that make a scam pass every checkpoint a cautious person might use. Commonwealth Bank research cited by ASIC found nine in ten Australians believe they could spot an AI-made scam, but fewer than half actually can. That gap between confidence and ability is exactly what scammers exploit, and the money usually ends up with overseas criminal networks, rarely to be recovered.
How it works, plainly: A typical scam starts with an ad on a mainstream platform featuring a deepfaked celebrity or politician. Clicking through leads to a fake news article or investment platform reinforced by invented quotes, glowing reviews and a professional-looking website. Victims who hand over details get scripted phone calls and sometimes a small "profit" payout to build trust before being asked for larger sums. ASIC says scammers track the news cycle and swap in whichever face is topical. Because the underlying platforms are often genuine and the audio-video sync convincing, catching it takes specific verification — not gut feel or a single search.
What to actually do: ASIC's advice: don't treat polished production or familiar branding as proof of legitimacy, independently verify any licence number against ASIC's own professional registers rather than the promoter's word, and be wary of pressure to act fast. It also runs the Moneysmart Investor Alert List for known scam operators. The regulator has removed over 33,400 scam sites, ads and phishing pages since starting takedown work three years ago, but that's a reactive fix — scams keep reappearing. Separately, independent MP Zali Steggall has proposed a bill requiring misleading AI-generated content in political ads to be labelled.