A mum has issued a warning to all parents after AI was used to create ‘deepfake’ nudes of her daughter and other school children in an alleged blackmail plot.
Police in Spain have reportedly identified seven suspects they believe created and shared the vile images. The victims’ ages are believed to be between 11 and 17.
Approximately 30 young girls at four schools in Spain’s western Extremadura region are understood to have been targeted. One mum said her “heart skipped a beat” when her 14-year-old daughter showed a ‘deepfake’ picture of herself that she’d been sent.
Miriam Al Adib shared a video on Instagram to warn other parents. She said: “If I didn’t know my daughter’s body, this photo looks real.”
In a message to the perpetrators, she said: “You’re not aware of the damage you are causing. Using images to create this disgusting material and distributing them is a very serious crime.”
In her post on Instagram, she wrote: “Girls, don’t be afraid to report such acts, tell your mothers. Mothers of affected who are not yet aware tell me so that you are aware in the group we have created.”
Replying to her post, mariquilla_1972 said: “My daughter went through something similar, they even tried to blackmail her. I went to the police… cyber crimes unit are wonderful.
“They told us they would already warn us and so it went. They scraped the phones and were personified in the brain house of the ‘prank’ and took the appropriate measures. Need to denounce and bring awareness.
“They are not jokes, they are a crime. And besides, sometimes the damage is irreparable.”
Another mother, Fátima Gómez, told the newspaper El País that she suffered an anxiety attack when she heard from another mother that her daughter had been targeted. When she asked her 12-year-old about the images, her child said that a boy on Instagram had asked for “some money” and then sent a deepfake naked photo when rejected.
Mothers of the children affected have now joined together in a support group. It is said that at least 30 girls from four different schools in Almendralejo have been targeted with the fake images.
Some of the children also reported blackmail attempts, saying they were asked for money to stop the images being circulated. The deepfake images first began to be reported last week, when children returned to schools.
María Guardiola, the president of Extremadura, said that “digital violence against women is a scourge that is on the rise”, and promised a training and awareness campaign to combat it.
Sensity AI, a research company that tracks fake hyperrealistic videos online, says the number of deepfakes on the internet doubles every six months. It says that, in 95 per cent of cases, the intention is to create pornography without consent, usually targeting women, reported The Telegraph.
