Karen Flowers, a 49-year-old beauty influencer based in Virginia, was recently sent a YouTube ad by her cousin. The clip featured an entity who looked just like Flowers promoting a life insurance company, but it wasn’t actually her. It was a deepfake made using her likeness.
“[My cousin] said, ‘I’m looking at it. It’s you. But I know it’s not you,’” Flowers, the founder of Curl House, a line of holistic hair-care products, told The Post. “Clearly, it was my image. I looked at it and knew exactly what YouTube video it came from. My lips were synchronized with the words, but it didn’t sound like me.”
Rogue gangs in far-off countries are stealing the images of social media stars and repurposing them for their own purposes — often to create fabricated ads for products they’ve never heard of. Influencers, whose livelihood is dependent on their hard-won credibility and relationships with their followers, are finding themselves powerless to stop it.
“It’s horrifying,” Flowers said.
$893 million fleeced
It’s difficult to quantify exactly how big the problem is, but Google recently sued a Chinese network called Outsider Enterprise.
The alleged cybercrime group is accused of using Google’s artificial intelligence tools to make phony websites and push out more than 100,000 financial scams. Meanwhile, according to the FBI, copycatting was used by cybercriminals to leech Americans out of some $893 million in 2025 alone.
The trend of stealing people’s likenesses started with celebrities. For years, in a low-tech version of the scam, criminals have been making social media accounts that appear to belong to celebrities and then contacting people pretending to be them, asking for money or gift cards.
Over the last year or so, Oprah Winfrey, Kim Kardashian, Gwyneth Paltrow and other celebs have all had their images hijacked and used in deepfake videos, often selling unlikely products.
In 2024, Taylor Swift was made to look like she was leading an online giveaway of pricey Le Creuset cookware. YouTube star MrBeast appeared to be hawking iPhones for $2 each if “you’re one of the lucky 10,000 people,” according to one video. He later went to X to blast “the deepfake scam of me.”
Even the genial Tom Hanks has been hit. In 2023, he was turned into a pitchman for a dental plan. “I have nothing to do with it,” he warned fans on Instagram.
The year prior, entrepreneur and TV personality Bethenny Frankel sued TikTok over her image being used without permission. She accused the platform of failing to stop deepfake ads that, according to NBC News, showed her selling counterfeit designer cardigans “with which [Frankel has] no affiliation,” and cited harm to her personal brand.
According to NBC News, Frankel put up a TikTok post “with the intent to inform consumers about the deception,” only for TikTok to remove it, deeming the post “abusive.”
“This has to be addressed,” Frankel said on “Good Morning America.” “The bigger issue is TikTok and the wild, wild west of social media.”
The case went into arbitration, and Frankel’s people said they “don’t have information on where the lawsuit currently stands.” TikTok did not respond to a request for comment.
“Good Morning America” ran a statement from TikTok that, in part, said, “We have strict policies to both protect people’s hard-earned intellectual property and keep misleading content off TikTok.”
Fighting back
Unlike A-listers and huge reality stars, influencers and “micro-celebrities” often lack the means to fight back, and tracking down the scammers can be next to impossible.
“I looked up the company [that had the digitally recreated version of me] and it took me to a shell company,” Flowers said. “I could never reach them. I didn’t know where to send a cease-and-desist letter.”
Finally, a consumer advocate from her hometown news station in Virginia stepped in and got YouTube to take down the bogus commercial.
YouTube did not respond to a request for comment, though Flowers, who has 102,000 followers on the platform, acknowledged, “I don’t blame YouTube. I feel like these companies are catching up with AI, which is here to stay.”
Kara Mendelsohn, a fashion influencer with 125,000 Instagram followers who worked for Calvin Klein in the 1990s, has also had her image stolen and used against her wishes.
She posted a still from one of the ads to Instagram Stories, writing, “This is NOT me!!! This company has stolen my image and my voice to create this AI ad. There is also one for a GLP1 that is NOT me! I hate this and Instagram does nothing to take this down.”
Spotting scams
Meta — which owns Instagram and Facebook — told The Post that identifying this sort of content can be a challenge as technology constantly evolves, but said it is continually working to improve its systems and get a step ahead.
The company advises users to consider several factors to try and determine if content has been created as a deepfake. They include checking the trustworthiness of the account sharing the content and looking for details that might appear unnatural.
Image theft can sneak up on a person at the most unexpected times. Nassia Matsa, a London-based model and journalist, was riding the city’s Underground when, she told The Post, “I saw an ad with someone that looked like me. It felt very uncanny. The image came from an editorial that I did for a Paris-based magazine back in 2019.
“[The entity that did the phony ad] chose diverse models to seem modern and relevant, a very performative act, since none of us got paid or even consented to be part of this ad.”
More recently, “skinfluencer” Arielle Lorre, 40 and based in Los Angeles, was disturbed to find a deepfake of herself gushing about a skincare product from a company called Skaind, which she had never worked with, in an interview. The man giving the interview in the promotion posted to X that his image had also been stolen.
“You can imagine how unsettling it is to see yourself saying things you’ve never said, sitting in an interview you’ve never sat in,” she told Inc. magazine. “Not only is it illegal, but it also dilutes my brand.”
The issue underscores what can happen when bad actors use social media and artificial intelligence for their own nefarious means. It all drives home a point made by Frankel on “Good Morning America” about videos online.
“I want people to know you must enter at your own risk,” Frankel said. “You must not operate freely. You must be protected.
