What Are Deepfakes, and How Can You Spot Them? (2025)
Learn about the rapid advances in deepfake technology, the potential threat to businesses, and possible solutions.
Learn about the rapid advances in deepfake technology, the potential threat to businesses, and possible solutions.
In the first half of 2023 alone, Britain lost £580 million ($728 m) to fraud. Of this total, £43.5 million ($55 m) was stolen through impersonations of police or bank employees, with £6.9 million ($8.6 m) lost to impersonations of CEOs. These impersonations were done using deepfakes.
In 2024, a finance worker at a multinational firm paid out $25 million after a video call with the CEO. The alleged CEO turned out to be a deepfake, and the money was transferred to fraudsters.
Deepfakes, hyper-realistic synthetic media created using sophisticated AI algorithms, have captured the imagination of the public while raising concerns about their misuse.
Deepfakes today pose significant threats to businesses, ranging from reputational damage to financial fraud. So, how do businesses best protect themselves? Let’s dive into the implications of deepfakes for businesses and how AI technology can be used to identify and combat this growing threat.
Deepfakes are synthetic media in which a person’s likeness is replaced with someone else’s through advanced artificial intelligence techniques, often used to create convincing but false images or videos.
Some examples of deepfakes include:
Suggested read: The Dark Side of Deepfakes: A Halloween Horror Story
Deepfakes work by leveraging deep learning algorithms (face swapping) to create realistic fake images, videos, or audio based on someone’s facial expressions, gestures, and voice patterns. These algorithms analyze and synthesize someone’s appearance to generate new content, seamlessly replicating their natural movements and speech patterns. Post-processing techniques may be applied to further enhance the realism of the deepfake, making it increasingly difficult to distinguish from genuine content.
A study by Home Security Heroes revealed more than 95,000 deepfakes circulating online in 2023, up 550% since 2019. It also revealed that 98% of deepfake videos were pornographic, with 99% using a woman’s likeness.
In 2023, the use of deepfakes surged across the globe, and by 2024, they have turned into widely used and accessible fraud tools. According to Sumsub Identity Fraud Report 2024, there has been a 4x increase in the number of deepfakes detected worldwide from 2023 to 2024, accounting for 7% of all fraud attempts.
The results fraudsters can achieve using AI are becoming indistinguishable from reality. For instance, 70% of people in a worldwide McAfee survey said they weren’t confident they could tell the difference between a cloned voice and a real one.
The proliferation of open-source tools and tutorials has made deepfake creation highly accessible, raising concerns about the potential misuse of this technology. Deepfakes therefore pose several dangers for businesses:
Deepfakes can manipulate public opinion, spread misinformation, and undermine trust in various aspects of society. They can be used to manipulate elections, damage reputations, spark conflict, and lure people into relationships with the intent to deceive.
Just recently, a woman in Scotland was tricked into sending £17,000 ($21,200) to a person with whom she thought she was in an online relationship. Despite being skeptical initially, she was convinced by the videos the scammer sent the victim. These videos appeared to be fake.
Suggested read: Detecting Romance and Dating Scams: A 2024 Guide for Dating Platforms and Their Users
Furthermore, deepfakes raise ethical and privacy concerns, as they can violate individuals’ rights and dignity by appropriating their images without consent, potentially causing psychological trauma.
As such, deepfakes have broad implications that affect society and everyone’s well-being, safety, and trust in the digital age.
While there is no way to completely eliminate the risk of deepfake abuse, there are preventative measures both businesses and users can take:
See if you can determine whether the picture is a deepfake in our Whack-a-Deepfake minigame: For Fake’s Sake.
The best ways for businesses to spot deepfakes are: