Arabic version: هيئة الأوراق المالية والاستثمارات الأسترالية تحذّر من تصاعد عمليات انتحال الهوية الاستثمارية بالذكاء الاصطناعي
According to ABC News, the Australian Securities and Investments Commission has reported a sharp rise in AI deepfake scams that use false endorsements from celebrities, politicians and public figures to promote bogus investment schemes. ASIC said it removed a record 19,400 online scams over the past 12 months, a 182 per cent increase on the previous year.
The scams commonly begin with social-media advertisements featuring AI-generated impersonations of finance or political figures. Users can be taken to fake news sites designed to provide “social proof”, before being directed to fraudulent investment platforms. ASIC identified Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, Gina Rinehart, John Laws, Senator Pauline Hanson and ABC finance journalist Alan Kohler among the frequently impersonated people.
ASIC said scammers may later contact victims by phone, offer supposed investment opportunities and sometimes provide small profits to build trust. The regulator said criminals are responsive to the news cycle and can pivot to subjects including interest rates and cryptocurrency. Australians lost more than $2 billion to scams in 2025, the National Anti-Scam Centre reported, with investment scams accounting for $837.7 million, or more than 38 per cent, of those losses.
ASIC chair Sarah Court said increasingly polished content, familiar branding and convincing reviews were making scams more difficult to identify. She said AI was significantly worsening the challenge, meaning people could examine material closely and still be unable to determine whether it was fake. ASIC urged consumers to check whether an investment has an Australian Financial Services Licence, while noting that scammers can impersonate legitimate businesses and use their licence details.
Kohler said repeated removals of impersonation accounts had become a “whack-a-mole” problem. He called for rapid government intervention, while Court said social-media companies needed to do more to protect users. Meta said a higher number of removals could reflect stronger detection and enforcement rather than more scams on a particular platform, and said facial-recognition technology for impersonation ads had contributed to a 22 per cent reduction in user reports.
