Surrey’s Police and Crime Commissioner, Lisa Townsend, has created her own deepfake video to highlight the dangers of AI-generated fraud as part of a new campaign: Question Everything.

A deepfake is basically a video, picture or audio clip edited with AI to look real.

The video shows a deepfake of the commissioner promoting a new financial scheme open to every Surrey resident and was released on the PCC’s social media channels enticing users to find out how they could “secure money in their bank accounts”.

The fake moving image of Lisa explains how registration simply involves confirming a couple of personal details including residential address and online bank details.

The film then swiftly reveals the real Lisa Townsend explaining that the financial scheme is not genuine, and that the fake Lisa was created using artificial intelligence.

The video was released to mark the launch of the Question Everything campaign which aims to raise awareness of the emerging threat of AI-generated fraud and how easy it is for criminals to use the technology to create fake content to scam victims.

The commissioner’s office has also created a free information guide, “The dangers of AI and deepfakes: How to avoid becoming the victim of AI generated scams”. Both the information guide and campaign film with deepfake is available at surrey-pcc.gov.uk/question-everything-fraud/

Ms Townsend said: “Artificial intelligence is becoming more sophisticated every day and whilst it can no doubt bring huge benefits to the way we work and live it is also being exploited by criminals looking to target people for profit.

“I wanted to create the deepfake video to show how easy it is for fraudsters to convincingly impersonate somebody, particularly those in the public eye. Astonishingly, the fake version of me was primarily generated from a series of still images that were available in the public domain.

“Only three seconds of audio is required to clone a person’s voice to be manipulated and say whatever a criminal wants – the results are frightening.

“With Black Friday sales and Christmas fast approaching, I am urging everyone who watches content online, scrolls through social media posts, receives unexpected phone calls, and unsolicited emails to pause and ‘Question Everything’ that they are watching, reading or hearing. AI has made the scammers’ space into a fraudsters’ paradise”.

Fraud is currently the most prevalent crime against an individual, accounting for more than one in three of all crimes, according to The Crime Survey for England and Wales. And the dangers of deepfakes are apparent as Action Fraud reports that £10million was lost last year to fraudsters who convinced victims to invest into bogus schemes by using an influential person that had been created by AI.

Ms Townsend added: “AI is enabling fraudsters to enhance tried-and-tested tactics more quickly and commit more sophisticated, high-volume scams, at greater scale. As the application of deepfakes and cloned voices grow, everyone needs to be aware, keeping defences up, to protect themselves from the scammers’ next move. As a community, we must stay vigilant and Question Everything.”