cross-posted from: https://reddthat.com/post/56223456
George Hendricks, a 69-year-old from Leesburg, a suburb of Orlando, told ClickOrlando he lost $45,000 after a scammer targeted him with a deepfake video of Musk. Deepfakes are digitally-altered videos often used to impersonate notable public figures.
Now, Hendricks tells the outlet that his wife “wants to get a divorce” over the scam.
It happens to soook many people. Thousands-10s of thousands of people a day. And not all of them are complete idiots, they are just stressed out/worried about some shit in a rush and make a mistake. You get a convincing enough email/text/call whatever and they call the number listed because they are worried someone got into their account.
Shit, I think I saw an article a couple days ago saying roughly $16 billion dollars were scammed from people in the U.S. like that in 2024 alone.
Very often the person who got scammed realizes right away but soon as that person that remoted in presses whatever button it’s done. If they aren’t paying attention, that $5,000 in Apple gift cards was bought with your face ID to verify it, the activation code was grabbed from the email they delete the email and end the call. They immediately redeem the activation code on a random Apple ID they have, and it’s a race to use those funds up before the person scammed realizes, gets a hold of Apple, and apple flags the purchase and freezes the account it was activated on.
Even if all the funds are still on the Apple account and frozen… The person who got scammed won’t get that money back I don’t believe. Apple profits from that purchase, why would they want to lose that sale. People buy Uber and other such gift cards as well. And not much is done to stop all these people getting scammed