Incident 858: Deepfake Reportedly Used in Attempted Real Estate Fraud in Hallandale Beach, Florida

Description: A scammer reportedly used deepfake technology to impersonate the owner of a vacant Hallandale Beach, Florida lot during a Zoom call. The scam matched forged IDs to public property records and nearly succeeded in defrauding the buyer of $52,000. The image used in the deepfake was reportedly that of a missing woman named Margrit Pritchard.
Editor Notes: See also: Incident 864: Generative AI Allegedly Used to Facilitate $255,000 Real Estate Fraud Scheme.

Tools

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Entities

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Alleged: Unknown deepfake technology developer developed an AI system deployed by Unknown scammer, which harmed Udi Levi , Margrit Pritchard , Lauren Albrecht , Josh Mor and Florida Title & Trust.
Alleged implicated AI system: Unknown deepfake tool

Incident Stats

Incident ID
858
Report Count
4
Incident Date
2024-09-19
Editors
Daniel Atherton
Applied Taxonomies
MIT

MIT Taxonomy Classifications

Machine-Classified
Taxonomy Details

Risk Subdomain

4.3. Fraud, scams, and targeted manipulation

Risk Domain

  1. Malicious Actors & Misuse

Entity

Human

Timing

Post-deployment

Intent

Intentional

‘I don’t think any property is safe’: South Florida man says he almost became a victim to AI real estate fraud
wsvn.com · 2024

(WSVN) - Artificial intelligence is now being used in real estate fraud here in South Florida, and it almost cost one local man his savings. 7’s Heather Walker investigates.

Udi Levi decided at 19 years of age that he wanted to invest in re…

‘It shocked me’: Scammers now using AI deepfakes to fraudulently sell real estate
local10.com · 2024

HALLANDALE BEACH, Fla. – It’s a sophisticated scam you may have never heard of -- using AI technology to try and fraudulently sell property -- but it almost happened recently in Hallandale Beach.

A would-be scammer used a missing woman’s ph…

‘It is not real': Title company owner warns of new twist to title fraud
nbcmiami.com · 2024

It didn’t take long for Lauren Albrecht to start seeing red flags.

“It’s women’s intuition,” Albrecht, the president of Florida Title and Trust said. “I just felt something was off.”

Once her title company got the contract for the sale of a…

Scammers are stealing homes from under their owners' noses. AI is making it scarily easy.
businessinsider.com · 2024

Spelling Manor --- a 120-room mansion in Los Angeles with its own bowling alley and beauty salon, built by Aaron Spelling, the television producer behind "Beverly Hills 90210" and "Dynasty" --- is one of the largest properties for sale in t…

Variants

A "variant" is an incident that shares the same causative factors, produces similar harms, and involves the same intelligent systems as a known AI incident. Rather than index variants as entirely separate incidents, we list variations of incidents under the first similar incident submitted to the database. Unlike other submission types to the incident database, variants are not required to have reporting in evidence external to the Incident Database. Learn more from the research paper.

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