Friday it's up, Monday it's down

A resident of South Los Angeles was defrauded of more than $80,000 after being targeted by a scam involving a deepfake video of actor Steve Burton. The incident, reported on August 27, 2025, involved the victim losing her life savings and proceeds from the sale of her condo to perpetrators impersonating the General Hospital star.

What happened

The attack utilized artificial intelligence to synthesize both the image and voice of Steve Burton, who plays the character Jason Morgan on the soap opera. According to AI experts, the creation of such a convincing deepfake video is increasingly accessible, with software capable of producing similar results in approximately 15 minutes for only a few dollars.

Industry experts note that scammers leverage publicly available content from the internet to train these models. Kathleen Grace, chief strategy officer for the security firm Vermillio, demonstrated the ease of this process by creating a similar scam-style video during a news segment, highlighting the current lack of effective guardrails against such technology. While new AI-related laws have been implemented in California and federal legislative efforts are underway to mandate the labeling of AI-generated content, experts warn that many scammers operate internationally and remain unaffected by domestic regulations. To mitigate these risks, security professionals advise extreme skepticism regarding unsolicited communications, particularly those that attempt to move conversations to encrypted messaging platforms like Telegram or WhatsApp.