Two Bengaluru people fell prey to Narayana Murthy and Mukesh Ambani deep fake videos, loses close to ₹90L: Report
Last year, Narayana Murthy had alerted people that many trading platforms are using his identity for promotions and said that he does not endorse any of them.
Two Bengaluru people got scammed by deep fake videos of Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy and Reliance Chairperson Mukesh Ambani and lost close to ₹80 lakh collectively, reported The Times of India. Separate cases have been registered at Bengaluru south CEN police station and investigation is going on.
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How does the scam work?
According to the report, Veena, a Banashankari resident found a video where Narayana Murthy was promoting a trading platform and promising high returns. Without realising it was a deepfake video, Veena clicked the link and submitted her details. A person contacted her later, claiming that he is an agent, and asked her to invest money to get high returns. She initially invested ₹1.4 lakh from her credit card and profited ₹8000. She then invested ₹6.7 lakh but was not paid back.
Veena then came across another ad on Instagram where she saw a work-from-home opportunity. She was told to give ratings to ASOS platform to earn a good amount of money on a daily basis. Veena invested ₹67 lakh into it and a profit of ₹55,000 was shown to her in the portal. However, while withdrawing the money, she was asked to pay a high tax on the money, and later, nobody responded to her calls.
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In another incident, retired employee Ashok Kumar was cheated in a similar scam. He came across a Facebook ad for a trading platform promoted by a deep fake video of Mukesh Ambani, promising high returns if the money was invested. Kumar transferred 19 lakhs to two different accounts provided by fraudsters. The victim later stopped getting any response from the other end and realized that he had been cheated.
Last year, Narayana Murthy had alerted people that many trading platforms are using his identity for promotions and said that he does not endorse any of them. In an X post, Murthy said, “In recent months, there have been several fake news items propagated via social media apps and on various web pages available on the Internet claiming that I have endorsed or invested in automated trading applications named BTC AI Evex, British Bitcoin Profit, Bit Lyte Sync, Immediate Momentum, Capitalix Ventures etc. The news items appear on fraudulent websites that masquerade as popular newspaper websites and some of them even publish fake interviews using deepfake pictures and videos. I categorically deny any endorsement, relation or association with these applications or websites.”