2026-09-20T23:22:28.549Z
- publishedAt:
Not provided→ 2025-07-07T00:00:00.000Z
SOURCE-LINKED INTELLIGENCE
Chicago Veteran Reportedly Loses $10,000 in Purported Deepfake Cryptocurrency Fraud Posing as Elon Musk
A Chicago-area Vietnam War veteran, Richard Lyons, reportedly lost $10,000 to a cryptocurrency scam that used purported AI voice cloning and fake social media profiles to impersonate Elon Musk. The fraudster allegedly convinced Lyons to invest in bogus cryptocurrency opportunities using fake voice memos, images, and spoofed caller IDs showing "Elon Musk." The scam reportedly involved dozens of messages and deepfake audio files that reinforced the impersonation.
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- recordType
- incident-report
- evidenceStatus
- reported
- region
- Global
Reported occurrence date: 2025-07-07T00:00:00.000Z
Evidence & attribution
- AI Incident Database
- AI Incident Database · 2025-07-07T00:00:00.000Z
AI Incident Database, Responsible AI Collaborative; McGregor (2021), Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents. Incident-specific contributor credits are available at each citation link. Metadata adapted; article text excluded.
License: CC BY-SA 4.0
First collected: 2026-09-19T22:50:59.123Z. This is not the publication date.
Observed changes
AIIC observation times, not verified publisher revision times. Up to eight recent revisions.