AI deepfakes an 'emergency in the making' and Alan Kohler is on the front line

Scammers are using impersonations of celebrities, politicians and trusted public figures to promote fake investment schemes, with the corporate watchdog warning AI is making the practice increasingly common, sophisticated and harder to detect.

A report by ASIC released today has highlighted a "sharp rise" in deepfake videos, where scammers trick victims into putting money into bogus investment platforms and websites.

ASIC said it has removed more than 19,000 scams in the past 12 months, up 182 per cent on the previous year. 

The scams usually involve AI deepfakes of well-known finance or political personalities on social media, which take victims to fake news websites as "social proof" before funnelling people to dodgy investment websites.

Among the famous faces most impersonated for these scams were Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, Opposition Leader Angus Taylor, billionaire Gina Rinehart, the late broadcaster John Laws, Senator Pauline Hanson, and the ABC's own Alan Kohler.

The report said the scams often start as social media advertisements with a celebrity "endorsement", which takes victims to fake news articles that spruik sham investment platforms that take victims' money.

Once scammers have their details, they follow up with phone calls, 'investment opportunities' and even some small profits to build trust with their victims.

ABC News itself is no stranger to impersonation, with scammers concocting click-bait articles purporting to be from the public broadcaster, prompting it to publish information about the scams on its website.

They often depict a well-known personality caught hiding a "secret approach" to wealth or investing, which then directs victims to the scam websites.

Australians lost more than $2 billion to scams in 2025 according to the latest report of the National Anti-Scam Centre, with financial losses increasing by almost 8 per cent compared to the previous year.

Investment scams made up more than 38 per cent of that figure — equivalent to $837.7 million — followed by payment redirection scams which recorded losses of almost $167 million.

ASIC said scammers are nimble and responsive to the news cycle, pivoting to topical issues, such as interest rates and cryptocurrency.

A constant game of 'whack a mole'

Alan Kohler, a veteran ABC finance journalist who is a frequent subject of impersonation scams, said, "it's taken a lifetime to build trust and it's so easily lost".

He said that when he contacted Meta, they would take the accounts down, only for them to appear again.

"It was like whack a mole … it just kept coming back."

Alan Oster, NAB's former chief economist, is also a common subject of these ads, and was immediately concerned that people would think he had genuinely endorsed the schemes.

At its worst, he said he would be receiving 10 messages each week from people letting him know.

"[I thought] 'Oh s***, this is terrible. How can I stop it?' Because people will actually lose money and blame me. So I felt terrible," he said.

"It's appalling, but there's nothing apparently they [social media companies] can do because they're operating from offshore."

ASIC chair Sarah Court said social media companies need to step up to protect users.

"We think that the social media companies have a lot to answer for in relation to scams," she said.

She said the scams protection framework will bring social media companies into the ecosystem to try and stop this online deception.

Ms Court said that ASIC is trying to disrupt these scams at their source, and the regulator is able to take down sites and make sure they do not go up again.

The report urged people to always check if an investment scheme has an Australian Financial Services Licence, although this is not a guarantee that the scheme is legitimate or that it will deliver the claimed returns.

The regulator warned some scam websites impersonate legitimate businesses, including their AFSL, and that users need to ensure that the investment matches the name on the licence.

AI making scams harder to detect

Ms Court said the content promoting these scams is getting more polished, using familiar branding and convincing user reviews, making them harder to detect.

"AI is significantly exacerbating the challenges in a range of ways," she said.

Previously, people could research an investment to see whether it was legitimate, but now users can, "Look at it very carefully, take your time over it and still not be able to ascertain if it's a fake or not," Ms Court said.

Mr Kohler said he suspects the situation is "only going to get worse" and thinks the only practical solution to deal with the scams is through further government intervention.

"The government's got to get involved rapidly, it can't be left to the platforms to do it,"

he said.

"The government has to really come down hard on them, with fines and regulations; and I think this is a really potentially an emergency in the making here."

In the past three years, the regulator has removed more than 33,400 scam websites, social media and phishing scams.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Meta (the company behind Facebook and Instagram) said an increase in the number of scams taken down online "can reflect more effective detection and enforcement capabilities, not necessarily an increase in scams on any particular platform".

The spokesperson also noted that the company had rolled out facial recognition technology to detect impersonation scam ads, and claimed it had contributed to a 22 per cent drop in user reports.

Meta's statement, however, did not respond to questions about why advertisements promoting these scams keep being approved by its systems, or how much money it made from them.