Andrew Forrest’s fury over deepfake scam
Billionaire Andrew Forrest has vented his fury at Facebook’s parent company Meta for failing to spend some of its vast profits on stopping scams, labelling the platform ‘reprehensible’.
Billionaire Andrew Forrest has vented his fury at Facebook’s parent company Meta for failing to spend some of its vast profits on stopping scams, labelling the tech giant “reprehensible” after a new deepfake video emerged using his identity.
Dr Forrest says criminal charges he brought against Meta over scam ads that were run on Facebook five years ago were aimed at preventing Australians from being ripped off.
Despite the ongoing court case, the social media heavyweight was still running bogus ads that use artificial intelligence to make it appear as though prominent Australians are supporting investments that are entirely fraudulent, he said.
A new 11-minute video detected last week on Instagram, also owned by Meta, has a fake Dr Forrest spruiking as “100 per cent genuine and 100 per cent legitimate” a fraudulent stock and cryptocurrency trading scheme.
Dr Forrest said it was “reprehensible ... a company valued at more than $1 trillion USD – makes a deliberate business decision to harm Australians by refusing to spend the software engineering dollars needed to upgrade their systems to detect these AI ads”.
“That’s what I hope the legal actions I started will address; to make social media companies liable for the negligent way they run their ad platforms,” he said.
Meta is fighting the criminal charges brought by Dr Forrest over an alleged cryptocurrency advertising scam using his image that appeared on its site in 2019.
Lawyers for Meta formallypleaded not guilty in the District Court in Western Australia in December to three counts of recklessly dealing in proceeds of crime.
The Australian last year revealed a new generation of deepfake videos of prominent Australians, created using artificial intelligence, were being used to promote financial scams on Facebook and other social media sites.
Doctored video footage of entrepreneur Dick Smith, Treasurer Jim Chalmers, TV host Allison Langdon, Dr Forrest, and Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart featured in the videos.
Mrs Rinehart has personally written to Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg to urge him to stop scammers using her name and identity on his social media platforms Facebook and Instagram.
Mr Smith has also previously written to Facebook to complain, and said he did not want to “spend hundreds of thousands of dollars” on legal action.
“I shouldn’t need to do that. The company should be ethical,” Mr Smith said.
“Facebook and Instagram could easily have a simple search which looks for something that has Dick Smith, Andrew Forrest and Gina Rinehart and just delete it, but they don’t even do that – they’re so greedy.”
Dr Forrest said on Friday: “I commenced legal proceedings almost two years ago out of concern for the innocent Australians being scammed on Facebook. It is as important now as it was in 2019 when we first demanded Facebook be accountable for what transpires on its platform.
“The legal actions were taken on behalf of those everyday Australians – Mums and Dads, Grans and Grandads – who work all their lives to gather their savings and to ensure those savings aren’t swindled away by scammers.
“I want social media companies to use more of their vast resources and billions of dollars in annual revenue to protect vulnerable people – the people who are targeted and fall victim to these horrible scams with their hard-earned savings.
“Social media is part of our lives, but it’s in the public interest for more to be done to ensure fraud on social media platforms is eliminated or significantly reduced.”
Dan Halpin, chief executive of online fraud investigation firm Cybertrace, detected the deepfake video being circulated on Instagram. He was investigating if it was also run on Facebook.
People who clicked on the fake video of Dr Forrest were taken to a website for Quantum AI, previously linked to scam ads featuring tech billionaire Elon Musk.
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