Purported Deepfake Impersonating Cyprus President Nikos Christodoulides Reportedly Defrauded Citizens of Thousands of Euros
Description
Around December 2025, Cypriot authorities reported that scammers used a purportedly AI-generated deepfake video impersonating President Nicos Christodoulides and other officials to promote a fraudulent investment platform. The video deceived about 15 citizens, who each lost between €10,000 and €15,000. Officials warned that malicious AI impersonation schemes are increasing and that citizens currently lack effective protection.
Actors
Alleged Deployers
- unknown-scammers-in-cyprus
- unknown-scammers-impersonating-nikos-christodoulides
- scammers
Alleged Developers
- deepfake-technology-developers
- synthetic-audio-generation-technology-developers
Harmed Parties
- nikos-christodoulides
- general-public
- general-public-of-cyprus
- epistemic-integrity
Classification
Risk Domain
Malicious Actors & MisuseRisk Subdomain
4.3. Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation
MIT Risk Profile
Source
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Research Papers on This Topic
How Johnny Can Persuade LLMs to Jailbreak Them: Rethinking Persuasion to Challenge AI Safety by Humanizing LLMs
AgentHarm: A Benchmark for Measuring Harmfulness of LLM Agents
Regulating ChatGPT and other Large Generative AI Models
Great, Now Write an Article About That: The Crescendo Multi-Turn LLM Jailbreak Attack