A scam ad on Facebook and YouTube is using the likenesses of Elon Musk and a local news anchor to trick South Africans into believing they can earn R300,000 per month off a R4,700 investment.
Scams that appropriate the likenesses of well-known South Africans have taken a turn, as “deepfakes” featuring SABC news anchor Francis Herd are running as advertisements on Facebook and YouTube.opens with Herd’s deepfake saying, “Elon Musk’s project has scared government and big banks. He has come up with a secret investment that has made hundreds of people very rich.”
The video uses the SABC News branding and, in overlay text at the bottom of the screen, states: “Everyone who invests R4700 can earn R300,000 per month”. It was uploaded on Friday, 3 November 2023, and had amassed over 87,000 by Tuesday afternoon. A similar video is being used in advertisements on Facebook.However, a casual news viewer watching on a smaller screen or window could miss the details that reveal the deception.
Following the brief introduction from Herd’s AI-generated doppelganger, the video switches to a deepfake Elon Musk, who appears to be announcing “powerful, world-first investment software” to a room full of people.These outlandish claims of a 538% daily return and 6283% monthly yield are a dead giveaway that this is a scam.Fake-Musk goes on to claim that Nicky Oppenheimer and Johann Rupert have already invested in the project.
This is the second red flag. If someone tries to hard-sell you on a scheme and claims famous people have bought into it, end the conversation and verify it.There are other telltale signs throughout the video that it is a fake, including mismatched lettering in the lower third, clear signs of poor editing in the overlay text, and the deepfakes’ mouth movements not matching their speech.
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