Deepfake of Australian treasury, central bank officials used to promote investment scam

"Exclusive Chance for All Australian Residents!" reads a caption with the Facebook video from November 7.

"The Australian Securities Exchange along with the Reserve Bank have initiated groundbreaking measures to enhance the well-being of Australians!"

Styled as a report by news network Nine, the video opens with long-time newscaster Peter Overton apparently announcing that Australians could "consistently make $30,000 every month" under a new "financial platform" co-developed by the securities exchange and central bank (archived link).

The system "trades automatically without human intervention", Overton appears to say in the video.

It goes on to show clips of Australia's treasurer Jim Chalmers and former Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe appearing to promote the initiative (archived links here and here).

But source footage reveals the clips have been altered, while independent experts dismissed the video as a "low-quality" and "amateur" deepfake.

Footage doctored

Nine told AFP on December 11 that the video is phoney.

"Confirming it is a fake," assistant chief of staff Andrew Rickert said.

A keyword search on Google led to very similar footage of Overton uploaded on October 3 last year. It shows him talking about the Australian stock market and no mention is made of the investment scheme.

The genuine footage does not display any headline about an investment plan as seen in the manipulated video. It only contains the logos of 9News and investment research firm Morningstar (archived links here and here).

Comparing the clip featuring Lowe with its source footage shows the audio has been altered (archived link). The section in the doctored clip begins after 28 seconds in the real video.

The original shows Lowe delivering a speech at an economic conference in Brisbane in mid-July, where he discussed recommended reforms of Australia's central bank following an independent review (archived link).

Lowe makes no mention of a new trading platform in either the 20-minute speech or his 28-minute question-and-answer session.

Source footage for the clip of Chalmers reveals similar inconsistencies (archived link). The original segment, published by broadcaster Sky News Australia on November 2, shows Chalmers talking about reaching net-zero emissions and the switch to renewable energy. He does not mention any investment scheme.

The doctored newscast also contains a montage of old and unrelated clips including this footage from 2008 and 2015 by CNN and CNBC (archived links here and here).

'Low-quality deepfake'

While the ability of artificial intelligence to fabricate and alter images has rapidly progressed in recent years, clues still show up in most AI videos exposing their inauthenticity.

Common indicators include pixelation or blurring around people's heads, badly synced sound and "inconsistency across a video, such as glitches, sections of lower quality and changes in the lighting or background", according to Australia's eSafety Commissioner (archived link).

AFP previously debunked another deepfake video that featured a prominent South Korean journalist apparently pushing an investment scheme.

Sara Oscar, a visual researcher at the University of Technology Sydney, told AFP in a December 8 email that the Australian video has all the telltale signs of a "low-quality deepfake" (archived link).

"What makes the deepfake low quality is that the subject’s face glitches when it is turned from a frontal to a profile position," she said of the segment featuring Overton.

"You can also see in a section of the video that the subject’s hand moves up and down repetitively in a slowed motion, this suggests that a sample of video has been taken from a longer clip and looped."

Image

Daniel Miller, a psychology lecturer at James Cook University, has researched people's ability to detect deepfake videos (archived here).

Analysing the Chalmers clip, Miller told AFP in a December 7 email that his mouth movements were "very mismatched" with the audio. He also pointed out how the Australian treasurer's voice slips "into an American accent in parts".

Miller suggested it could be difficult to emulate Australian accents due to a lack of datasets from which to generate the sound.

"I have definitely seen better quality deepfakes," he said.

'Obvious scam'

The Facebook post appears to link to a news article, but actually directs users to a site that claims people can earn up to Aus$1,800 per day using the trading platform.

"This is an obvious scam," Steve Brain of video analytics firm Vix Vizion told AFP in a December 8 phone call (archived links here and here).

Brain is Vix Vizion's chief technical officer and has spent more than two decades working on facial recognition software and video analytics.

"This stuff is amateur," Brain said, adding that the video relied on psychological cues and not technical strength.

Online scams cost Australians Aus$3.1 billion last year -- an increase of 80 percent on the figure in 2021, according to Australia's consumer rights watchdog (archived link).

"It's putting into people's ears what they want to hear," Brain said. "They're not trying to hook everyone -- they're targeting the most gullible people."

But the potential for harm extends far beyond money, Brain warned.

"They're using people with perceived trustworthiness," he said. "There are very serious implications for political influence, including from state and non-state actors."