1,280 yuan for a ready-made face. Put it on and go live; the person on screen calls viewers “family” and sells skincare products whose bottles the real person has never even seen.
In the early hours of this morning, actress Wu Yue posted on Weibo. I found and watched the video she called out. You wake up after one night’s sleep and wonder: who is using AI to impersonate people at will and do evil in their name? In the video, she recommends a skincare product, saying she negotiated with the manufacturer herself and was teaming up with them to offer a special deal in thanks to her longtime fans. One sales pitch after another: buy one, get three; only available today; cheaper than even the biggest sales; if you don’t like it, send it all back; safe for pregnant women and moms. The account is called “Sister Hua’s Skincare Diary,” and videos on the same account also feature table-tennis legend Deng Yaping promoting products. A line of tiny text below the video says it contains AI-generated content. That line won’t save anyone.
Wu Yue didn’t stop at calling them out. She went on to ask: surely the platform knows where the money is going? Can’t this kind of thing be traced?
Actress Wen Zhengrong wants to ask the same thing. Since April this year, she has appeared in several livestreams at once. At the same time, with different makeup and products, they all say the same things. She entered one livestream and asked the person, “If you’re Wen Zhengrong, then who am I?” She was blocked in seconds. Her exact words were: “Right now, it’s very hard for me to prove that I’m me.”
In the sports world, even entire families have been targeted. While Olympic diver Quan Hongchan was recovering from an injury, a string of accounts using names like “Chanbao’s Little Assistant” and “Quan’s Fan Perks” used cloned voices to sell free-range eggs. One product link sold 47,000 units. Her brother’s, mother’s, and father’s voices were cloned too. In her brother’s voice, one video promoted the family’s honey and claimed they had 2,000 orders ready to ship. Her family came out to debunk the claims, saying they had never authorized anyone to do this. At the end of September, the Cyberspace Administration of China launched a two-month “Clear and Bright” campaign. AI impersonation of public figures is third on its list of targets; the original wording says “impersonating public figures to make false endorsements and conduct marketing.” Wu Yue’s case falls squarely into this category.
The cost is even more striking. A reporter from National Business Daily posed as a buyer and investigated: a ready-made celebrity face costs 1,280 yuan; a custom one costs 1,980; and orders of three or more cost 1,600 each. The face vendor said he alone had received nearly 1,000 orders, and several machines ran until 5 a.m. every day. The trick for bypassing platform monitoring is to hijack the phone’s camera: what the platform sees is already a swapped face. They tried taking a photo, pinching the nose, showing teeth, and covering a large part of the face with an object. Nothing made the face swap drop. Yao Huanqing of Renmin University said this could constitute the crime of providing programs for intruding into computer information systems.
My assessment is that AI has driven the marginal cost of doing harm down to 1,280 yuan, while the marginal cost of holding anyone accountable is still through the roof. Celebrities can at least limit the damage by speaking out themselves in time. But where can the people who believed the videos and placed orders turn? No one answers.
People who have spent a long time in crypto have an instinct for ledgers. An on-chain transfer—from one address to another—is permanently public. Anyone can check it; no platform’s approval is needed, and it doesn’t depend on the platform’s mood that day. The money from livestream shopping scams goes through payments within the platform. The platform knows exactly where every cent goes. Whether to investigate and pursue the money is its own choice. That’s not to say the crypto world is a cure-all. Scammers’ receiving addresses are on the chain too, and they still need to be caught. The difference is simply that one answer is carved in stone, while the other is locked in a drawer.
I don’t know how many people the “Sister Hua” account scammed or how much it sold; the platform hasn’t disclosed that. When I was writing this, I also hadn’t seen any notice saying whether the account was still up after Wu Yue’s post.
$BTC $ETH $USDT
#吴越 #AI诈骗 #AI换脸 #温峥嵘 #全红婵
In the early hours of this morning, actress Wu Yue posted on Weibo. I found and watched the video she called out. You wake up after one night’s sleep and wonder: who is using AI to impersonate people at will and do evil in their name? In the video, she recommends a skincare product, saying she negotiated with the manufacturer herself and was teaming up with them to offer a special deal in thanks to her longtime fans. One sales pitch after another: buy one, get three; only available today; cheaper than even the biggest sales; if you don’t like it, send it all back; safe for pregnant women and moms. The account is called “Sister Hua’s Skincare Diary,” and videos on the same account also feature table-tennis legend Deng Yaping promoting products. A line of tiny text below the video says it contains AI-generated content. That line won’t save anyone.
Wu Yue didn’t stop at calling them out. She went on to ask: surely the platform knows where the money is going? Can’t this kind of thing be traced?
Actress Wen Zhengrong wants to ask the same thing. Since April this year, she has appeared in several livestreams at once. At the same time, with different makeup and products, they all say the same things. She entered one livestream and asked the person, “If you’re Wen Zhengrong, then who am I?” She was blocked in seconds. Her exact words were: “Right now, it’s very hard for me to prove that I’m me.”
In the sports world, even entire families have been targeted. While Olympic diver Quan Hongchan was recovering from an injury, a string of accounts using names like “Chanbao’s Little Assistant” and “Quan’s Fan Perks” used cloned voices to sell free-range eggs. One product link sold 47,000 units. Her brother’s, mother’s, and father’s voices were cloned too. In her brother’s voice, one video promoted the family’s honey and claimed they had 2,000 orders ready to ship. Her family came out to debunk the claims, saying they had never authorized anyone to do this. At the end of September, the Cyberspace Administration of China launched a two-month “Clear and Bright” campaign. AI impersonation of public figures is third on its list of targets; the original wording says “impersonating public figures to make false endorsements and conduct marketing.” Wu Yue’s case falls squarely into this category.
The cost is even more striking. A reporter from National Business Daily posed as a buyer and investigated: a ready-made celebrity face costs 1,280 yuan; a custom one costs 1,980; and orders of three or more cost 1,600 each. The face vendor said he alone had received nearly 1,000 orders, and several machines ran until 5 a.m. every day. The trick for bypassing platform monitoring is to hijack the phone’s camera: what the platform sees is already a swapped face. They tried taking a photo, pinching the nose, showing teeth, and covering a large part of the face with an object. Nothing made the face swap drop. Yao Huanqing of Renmin University said this could constitute the crime of providing programs for intruding into computer information systems.
My assessment is that AI has driven the marginal cost of doing harm down to 1,280 yuan, while the marginal cost of holding anyone accountable is still through the roof. Celebrities can at least limit the damage by speaking out themselves in time. But where can the people who believed the videos and placed orders turn? No one answers.
People who have spent a long time in crypto have an instinct for ledgers. An on-chain transfer—from one address to another—is permanently public. Anyone can check it; no platform’s approval is needed, and it doesn’t depend on the platform’s mood that day. The money from livestream shopping scams goes through payments within the platform. The platform knows exactly where every cent goes. Whether to investigate and pursue the money is its own choice. That’s not to say the crypto world is a cure-all. Scammers’ receiving addresses are on the chain too, and they still need to be caught. The difference is simply that one answer is carved in stone, while the other is locked in a drawer.
I don’t know how many people the “Sister Hua” account scammed or how much it sold; the platform hasn’t disclosed that. When I was writing this, I also hadn’t seen any notice saying whether the account was still up after Wu Yue’s post.
$BTC $ETH $USDT
#吴越 #AI诈骗 #AI换脸 #温峥嵘 #全红婵