Ta deepfakes, videos of people doing and saying things they have never done and never said is amazing technology that offers solutions e.g. in the movies, but at the same time it is also a powerful weapon in the hands of all sorts of sophisticated and cybercriminals who want to spread the fabricated, completely false actions of unsuspecting politicians, artists, athletes, famous and unknown people.

They are made to distort public dialogue, manipulate public opinion and electoral processes, spread political propaganda, and are also used for fraud and extortion. Very often they are also created to lure specific people into pornographic content without their consent.

A study by global digital security company Kaspersky has revealed a horrendous demand for deepfakes on the dark web and the astronomical prices at which they are sold by the cybercriminals who produce them. A one minute deepfake revenge porn video or a deepfake simulating cryptocurrency flows for use in a crypto scam costs between $300 and $20,000.

Creating high-quality deepfakes requires technical knowledge and advanced software, so people looking to create fake videos for malicious purposes turn to deepfake services available on the dark web.

Demand exceeds supply

The study shows that there is a high demand for deepfakes that exceeds the available supply. The cost of creating deepfakes varies depending on the complexity of the project and the quality of the final product. Those who request deepfakes for specific targets, such as celebrities or political figures, pay the highest costs.

A significant number of high-quality deepfakes concern popular crypto scammers (Cryptostreams or Fake Crypto Giveaways), where scammers collect cryptocurrency by broadcasting fake giveaways. To create such deepfakes, scammers use footage of celebrities or combine old videos to launch live broadcasts on social networks. They promise to double any cryptocurrency payment sent to them and often display a pre-made page asking victims to transfer between 2,500 and 1,000,000 XRP with the promise of doubling their payment. Users involved in this scam can lose between $1,000 and $460,000.

The purpose of pornographic deepfakes, in addition to revenge, is to blackmail the people who appear in them. Cybercriminals build them to order or sell building instructions to their customers. By this, their buyers blackmail their unsuspecting victims, causing them, in addition to emotional and huge financial damage.