Deepfake tool helped create more than 100,000 fake nude images of women: Report

Online frauds and abuse have increased since the pandemic and lockdowns began all over the world. In one such case of online menace, an unidentified online service is letting people create fake nude images of women.

The service was revealed in a report by an agency tracking deepfakes that uncovered a large network of growing ecosystem that has targeted at least 100,000 women.

Through deepfakes, which is an AI technology created years ago,people can create fake images of strangers and mould it as per their own needs.

The agency has identified an unidentified bot that has created more than 100,000 fake images of women and those images have been shared on public platforms. While this service has been active for the past few years, and has been used to tarnish the images of celebrities, the amount of images generated has increased massively in the last few months.As per the reports, majority of the victims are from Russia.

“Our investigation of this bot and its affiliated channels revealed several key findings. Approximately 104,852 women have been targeted and had their personal “stripped” images shared publicly as of the end of July, 2020. The number of these images grew by 198% in the last 3 months,” said the report.

The tool is available online for free, but to remove watermark the users are asked to$1.5, the agency reported. There were also dedicated groups for this service on social media platform called Telegram.

“The activity on the bot’s affiliated Telegram channels makes for bleak viewing. On the image sharing galleries, thousands of synthetically stripped images of young women taken from social media and private correspondence are constantly being uploaded,” said Henry Ajder, an expert on deepfakes and the lead author of the report who has since left Sensity.

While the original version was licensed toDeepNudes, the investigation agency found out that the license has since bene sold to ananonymous buyer for $30,000.

“We can state confidently that the individuals involved in the bot creation are very likely to be Russian native speakers, given the presence of this language among the users and the fact that a large part of the victim are Russian nationals," said Giorgio Patrini, CEO and chief scientist at Sensity.