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Alleged Deepfake Investment Scam Uses Economist David Rosenberg's Likeness on Meta Platforms

2 news reports Synced from source · record last edited 7 Sep 2026

In brief

An AI system built by Synthetic audio generation technology developers and Deepfake technology developers and deployed by Synthetic media creators, Scammers impersonating David Rosenberg and 2 others allegedly harmed Unnamed woman who lost $500, 000 and 6 others.

Risk domain
Malicious Actors & Misuse Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
Occurred
Coverage
2 reportsJun 2025

What happened

Fraudsters allegedly used AI-generated content and social media ads to impersonate economist David Rosenberg and promote a fraudulent investment scheme. Victims were reportedly directed to WhatsApp groups with fake stock tips, resulting in substantial financial losses, with some exceeding $500,000. The ads reportedly appeared on Meta platforms, including Facebook and Instagram. Rosenberg and his family reported the scam to authorities.

Editor's notes

Timeline note: 04/15/2025 is an approximate date. The ads reportedly began circulating sometime in April 2025. This incident ID was created 06/22/2025.

Laws that address this harm

Policy angle: Classified under Malicious Actors & Misuse (Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation) in the MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy; 5 recorded instruments address this use case.

Matched from the record's risk domain and country to the instruments recorded here. A reviewer can correct the match in the repository (data/external/incident_overrides.yaml).

News reports (2)

Titles link to the original publisher; report text is not reproduced here.

  1. Fraudulent Ads Posing as Renowned Economist David Rosenberg Offer Bogus Investment Schemes
    brokersview.com · BrokersView
  2. Scammers are impersonating finance experts to steal millions – and the real ones are struggling to stop it
    theglobeandmail.com · Mariya Postelnyak

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Unnamed woman who lost $500,000 Unnamed man who lost $450,000 Syed Hasan Investors General public Epistemic integrity David Rosenberg

AI systems implicated

WhatsAppSynthetic media generation technologySynthetic audio generation technologyMetaInstagramFacebookDeepfake technology

Classification (MIT AI Risk Repository taxonomy)

Causal entity
Human
Intent
Intentional
Timing
Post-deployment
Harm level
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Sectors
—
Countries
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Risk entries describing this failure mode

Entries from the MIT AI Risk Repository coded to subdomain 4.3.

  • Cheating/plagiarism

    "Cheating/plagiarism - Use of another person’s or group’s words or ideas without consent and/or acknowledgement."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • IP/copyright loss

    "IP/copyright loss - Misuse or abuse of an individual or organisation’s intellectual property, including copyright, trademarks, and patents."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Financial and business

    "Financial and Business - Use or misuse of a technology system in a manner that damages the financial interests of an individual or group, or which causes strategic, operational, legal or financial harm to a business or...

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Impersonation/identity theft

    "Impersonation/identity theft - Theft of an individual, group or organisation’s identity by a third-party in order to defraud, mock or otherwise harm them."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Dehumanisation/objectification

    "Dehumanisation/objectification - Use or misuse of a technology system to depict and/or treat people as not human, less than human, or as objects."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Defamation/libel/slander

    "Defamation/libel/slander - Use of a technology system to create, facilitate or amplify false perception(s) about an individual, group, or organisation."

    A Collaborative, Human-Centred Taxonomy of AI, Algorithmic, and Automation Harms (Abercrombie2024)

  • Misinformation and Manipulation

    "Recent studies have demonstrated that LLMs can be exploited to craft deceptive narratives with levels of persuasiveness similar to human-generated content (Pan et al., 2023b; Spitale et al., 2023), to fabri- cate fake n...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

  • Cybersecurity

    "LLMs may exacerbate cybersecurity risks in various ways (Newman, 2024). Firstly, LLMs may significantly amplify the effectiveness of deceptive operations aimed at tricking people into disclosing sensitive information or...

    Foundational Challenges in Assuring Alignment and Safety of Large Language Models (Anwar2024)

Linked by editors or by text similarity in the source dataset.

Incidents in the same risk subdomain

All incidents in this subdomain

Other incidents involving Synthetic media creators

Source record: incident #1115 on the AI Incident Database · all 2 reports