Morally Bankrupt Business Plans (#38): Deepfakes and Financial Sextortion

So, yesterday, I learned that there are "legitimate" businesses arranged around financial sextortion. They are mostly based out of India, and there are people trolling Facebook for lonely guys, posing as young women. The conversations are surprisingly quick: it's all less than ten minutes before the target is in a video conference. Then it gets even better: to deal with the fact that the employees are mostly male, they use a program that stitches together pre-recroded snippets of video. Once they have screenshots of the target, they move into FinSextortion, and ask for money.

This is a moral disaster, mostly because this entire thing is easily, easily automated. We use a GPT3-type language model to generate the chat As an aside, I'd make a small bet that GPT-3 turns out to be overkill, and a much simpler model converts more targets to victims. Once we've moved into the "sex chat" phase, use deep-fake technology to model the supposed violator, and take videos. At the very end, use a standard shopping cart solution.

The problem is, this is almost too easy. It means that it's almost certainly been done. And that's reeeeally scary. (Also, a "mockumentary" exploring doing this as a start-up would be amazing.)