Welcome To The Brave New World Of Vehicle Insurance Fraud Powered By Shallowfakes

The harms of deepfakes have been evident for a while. Recent examples include a Biden deepfake designed to influence voters, and the rising use of AI “nudification” apps to produce deepfake nudes of students, often female minors. But alongside the application of sophisticated AI programs to produce deepfakes there are other, lower-tech scams, often known as “shallowfakes”. An article in the Guardian explains “shallowfakes can be created using conventional editing software on a phone and apps such as Photoshop.” This is leading to a “surge in fraud cases” according to the article, involving vehicle insurance claims:

[The insurer] Allianz, which includes the general insurance arm of LV=, said in one case an individual had a photo of his van posted on his social media page as part of his business and ended up having a claim pursued in his name for an accident that never took place.

LV= received images of his vehicle from the fraudsters that seemed to show the front bumper had been cracked in the alleged accident, along with a fake repair invoice for more than £1,000 [around $1,250].

The LV= fraud team investigated and found the photo was identical to the one on the social media page, except for the fact that the image had been doctored to show the fake damage.

The article mentions another example of how shallowfakes are being used. Fraudsters are finding vehicles regarded as total losses by insurers on sites selling them for salvage, and then placing a different license plate on the image using digital editing tools. False insurance claims are then made with the shallowfake vehicle image.

These low-tech images probably aren’t hard to spot, but moving from shallowfakes to deepfakes could make that more difficult. In any case, the rise of both kinds of manipulation underlines once more that we live increasingly in a world where images and videos can no longer be taken at face value.

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