Inside the influencer nightmare of being cloned for deepfake ads: Its you, but you know its not you

Karen Flowers, a 49-year-old beauty influencer based in Virginia, was recently sent a YouTube ad by her cousin.The clip featured an entity who looked just like Flowers promoting a life insurance company, but it wasn’t actually her.

It was a deepfake made using her likeness.“[My cousin] said, ‘I’m looking at it.It’s you.

But I know it’s not you,'” Flowers, the founder of Curl House, a line of holistic hair-care products, told The Post.“Clearly, it was my image.

I looked at it and knew exactly what YouTube video it came from.My lips were synchronized with the words, but it didn’t sound like me.”Rogue gangs in far-off countries are stealing the images of social media stars and repurposing them for their own purposes — often to create fabricated ads for products they’ve never heard of.

Influencers, whose livelihood is dependent on their hard-won credibility and relationships with their followers, are finding themselves powerless to stop it.“It’s horrifying,” Flowers said.$893 million fleecedIt’s difficult to quantify exactly how big the problem is, but Google recently sued a Chinese network called Outsider Enterprise.

The alleged cybercrime group is accused of using Google’s artificial intelligence tools to make phony websites and push out more than 100,000 financial scams.Meanwhile, according to the FBI, copycatting was used by cybercriminals to leech Americans out of some $893 million in 2025 alone.The trend of stealing people’s likenesses started with celebrities.

For years, in a low-tech version of the scam, criminals have been making social media accounts that appear to belong to celebrities and then contacting people pretending to be them, asking for money or gift cards.Over the last year or so, Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow and other celebs have all had their images hijacked and used in deepfake videos, often selling unlikely products.In 2024, Taylor Swift was made to look like she was leading an online ...