Deepfake
Also known as: Deepfake fraud · Synthetic media · Voice cloning
An image, video or audio clip synthesized by artificial intelligence to reproduce the face or voice of a real person doing or saying something they did not.
Legal basis
FinCEN Alert FIN-2024-Alert004 (deepfake media)
Deepfakes became known as disinformation. For anyone verifying identity or moving money, the risk is operational: a real person's face generated in real time for an onboarding camera, a forged ID image, a cloned executive voice authorizing a wire. In November 2024 FinCEN issued an alert after seeing a rise in suspicious activity reports describing deepfake media used to get past identity verification, and asked institutions to tag such SARs with the key term FIN-2024-DEEPFAKEFRAUD.
Attacks come in two forms. Presentation shows the deepfake to a camera, on a screen; injection feeds the synthetic video straight into the stream, with no camera at all. The second is more dangerous because it slips past defenses that look for screen glare or a frame.
The law is catching up piecemeal: the federal TAKE IT DOWN Act of May 2025 criminalizes publishing nonconsensual intimate deepfakes and requires platforms to remove them on request. For fraud, the defense is not a single detector but combining injection-resistant liveness with signals a video cannot forge: the device's history, the identity's consistency with other sources, the connections between that record and earlier cases.
Frequently asked questions
How can you spot a deepfake?
To the naked eye, signs include irregular blinking, unstable face edges, inconsistent lighting and audio out of sync with the lips. Current deepfakes often show none of these, so reliable detection depends on technical tools and cross-checking against other sources, such as calling back on a known number.
Are deepfakes illegal in the US?
Creating one is not illegal in itself, but using one to commit fraud is, and the federal TAKE IT DOWN Act of 2025 makes publishing nonconsensual intimate deepfakes a crime. Many states have added laws on election and intimate deepfakes.