“It was identical. Same room, same guitar, same movements. It was literally my video… except I’d…

A growing number of prominent female guitarists and influencers are reporting that their performance videos are being stolen and repurposed by bad actors using generative AI. These scammers replace the original artist's face with AI-generated characters or manipulate their features to create deceptive content, often targeting the musicians' established fan bases for financial fraud and reputation damage.

What happened

The attack involves the systematic appropriation of high-quality instrumental performance videos. Scammers take real footage of artists—including Sophie Burrell, Sophie Lloyd, Larissa Liveir, Tanya Yakimova, Becky Baldwin, and Mari Zaghete—and use AI to overlay different faces or alter physical appearances. By maintaining the original audio, camera angles, and guitar movements, the deepfakes appear authentic to unsuspecting viewers.

These manipulated videos serve as the foundation for multi-layered social engineering campaigns. In some instances, scammers use the AI-generated content to build trust with fans before initiating private conversations to solicit money or request the purchase of gift cards. In more severe cases, perpetrators have used the artists' likenesses to generate non-consensual explicit imagery and pornographic content, which is then distributed in private groups.

Victims report that the stolen content is frequently used to funnel traffic toward inappropriate websites or to defraud fans who believe they are interacting with the actual musician. Despite the artists reporting these accounts to social media platforms, they report that platforms often fail to take punitive action, allowing the fraudulent accounts to multiply. The targeted guitarists note that the phenomenon exploits the male-dominated nature of the music scene, using the popularity of female-presenting musicians to create a "honeytrap" that tricks older male audiences. Beyond the financial and reputational harm, the artists express deep concern over the lack of legal protections and the inability of current social media moderation to address the theft of their identity and copyrighted work.