A retired professor from Shankarapuram has lost ₹61.10 lakh after being drawn into an investment scam that used a deepfake video of Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman as its opening hook. Police say the fraud combined AI-manipulated video, a fake trading platform, Telegram communication and calls routed through a United Kingdom number, a layered approach that has become disturbingly common in India’s investment fraud landscape.
Anatomy of a Trust-Building Fraud
The scam began on March 9, when the victim came across a Facebook video that appeared to show the Finance Minister endorsing a high-return investment scheme. Believing it genuine, she submitted her contact details and was directed to a platform called bxbmarket.com. A man identifying himself as “Abhishek,” calling from a UK number, then walked her through a KYC process by email before instructing her to transfer funds to a series of bank accounts and UPI IDs.
What followed is a pattern investigators say is now standard practice among such rings. The fraudsters credited ₹3.90 lakh back to her account as fabricated “profits” early on, and the platform’s dashboard later showed her holdings had swelled past ₹1 crore. Neither figure was real. When she tried to withdraw the displayed amount, the operators demanded further payments as processing charges and taxes; once she refused and grew suspicious, all contact stopped. Of the ₹65 lakh she ultimately transferred, ₹61.10 lakh was never recovered. She reported the fraud to the National Cyber Crime Helpline on June 25.
A Deepfake With a Documented History
This is not an isolated misuse of the Finance Minister’s likeness. Sitharaman has publicly acknowledged the problem, telling the Global FinTech Fest in Mumbai in October 2025 that several deepfake videos of her had been circulating online, manipulated to mislead citizens, and that the new generation of fraud is no longer about breaching firewalls but about hacking trust. Fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked similar clips; one December 2025 video was traced back to genuine summit footage and found by AI-detection tools to carry a 99.9 percent probability of being AI-generated, with the accompanying voice separately flagged as synthetic.
The Bengaluru case is also far from unique in scale or method. In March, a Khammam businessman lost over ₹2 crore and a Belagavi senior citizen lost ₹7.9 lakh, both after encountering nearly identical deepfake advertisements followed by tele-callers and fake trading dashboards. Investigators note the near-identical scripting across cases, small early “profits,” an inflated dashboard balance, and abrupt silence once the victim asks to withdraw, suggesting the operations may share infrastructure or training material.
Why the Illusion Works, and How to Break It
Investment fraud of this kind now accounts for the overwhelming majority of cybercrime losses nationally, driven by exactly this template of a familiar face, a fabricated profit, and an inflated balance designed to delay suspicion until the victim has committed far more than they intended. The use of a sitting Finance Minister’s image is not incidental; it borrows institutional trust that no anonymous scheme could otherwise generate.
To counter this, SEBI has introduced a dedicated verification mechanism. The regulator’s “SEBI Check” service allows investors to verify the UPI IDs and bank account details of registered intermediaries before making any payment, through its web portal and the Saarthi app, working across UPI, NEFT, RTGS and IMPS. Prof. Triveni Singh, the former IPS officer and cybercrime specialist, said deepfake technology has become one of the most effective social engineering tools available to criminals today, and urged the public never to rely on a video alone, however convincing, when deciding whether to invest. He advised independently verifying any platform through official regulators, treating guaranteed-return claims with scepticism, and avoiding investment offers circulated over Telegram or WhatsApp without separate confirmation. Anyone who suspects they have been targeted, he added, should report it immediately through the 1930 helpline or the National Cyber Crime Reporting Portal, since early reporting remains the strongest lever authorities have to freeze funds before they disappear into the wider laundering network that increasingly underpins these frauds.
