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Purported AI-Generated Deepfake of Spiritual Leader Sadhguru Used in Investment Scam Allegedly Defrauding Bengaluru Woman of ₹3.75 Crore (~$425,000)

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

In brief

An AI system built by Synthetic media generation technology developers, Synthetic audio generation technology developers and 1 other and deployed by Waleed B (scammer impersonating Sadhguru), Synthetic media creators and 5 others allegedly harmed Women and girls, Women and 8 others.

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

What happened

A 57-year-old woman in Bengaluru was allegedly defrauded of ₹3.75 crore (~$425,000 USD) after scammers used a purportedly AI-generated deepfake video of spiritual leader Sadhguru to promote a fake investment platform called Mirrox. The victim was reportedly recruited via Instagram and WhatsApp and was persuaded through trading tutorials on Zoom and fabricated profit screenshots. She reportedly realized the fraud only when withdrawals were blocked and additional fees were demanded.

Editor's notes

Timeline note: The reported scam occurred between February 25th to April 23rd, 2025; it was picked up by the press in early-to-mid September 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. Bengaluru woman defrauded out of Rs 3.75 crore with Sadhguru’s deepfake video: police
    indianexpress.com · Express News Service, The Indian Express
  2. Bengaluru woman duped of Rs 3.75 crore by deepfake trading scheme clip of Sadhguru
    indiatoday.in · Nagarjun Dwarakanath

Who was involved

Alleged harmed party
Women and girls Women Victims of investment scams Victims of impersonation scams Unnamed 57-year-old woman in Bengaluru targeted by scammers impersonating Sadhguru Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev General public of India General public of Bengaluru General public Epistemic integrity

AI systems implicated

ZoomWhatsAppSynthetic media generation technologySynthetic audio generation technologyMirroxInstagramDeepfake 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

Source record: incident #1206 on the AI Incident Database · all 2 reports