Judy Skene is 86 years old. She lives in Sault Ste Marie. She is a widow with no children. She spent her life saving money and last summer she lost all of it.
She saw a paid advertisement on Facebook. It featured Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, telling her about a crypto investment platform backed by the Bank of Canada. It was not Mark Carney. It was an AI deepfake, and Facebook ran it as a paid ad and collected the revenue.
She invested $350 to start. Scammers called her and told her the money had already tripled. Then she invested more. Then more. By the end she had taken out a $300,000 mortgage on her condo. She lost $900,000 total. Her entire life savings. Gone.
When she spoke to CTV News she said this: "Just be alert and be careful with what you see on Facebook."
She lost everything and her first instinct was to warn other people. That tells you exactly who Judy Skene is. And it tells you exactly how badly the system failed her.
Scammers specifically target people who trust authority figures. That is not a character flaw. It is a human trait that every con artist in history has exploited. The people running these operations are professionals. They test the ads. They refine the scripts. They know exactly which faces to use and which emotions to trigger. Judy Skene was not naive. She was targeted by experts using the Prime Minister's face as a weapon.
And Facebook ran the ad and made money from it.
Judy is not alone. A woman in Markham Ontario lost $1.7 million to a deepfake of Elon Musk on Facebook earlier this year. Canadians whose faces have been used in these scams include Carney, Trudeau, Michael Bublé, Rick Mercer, Sidney Crosby, and Mary Berg. The scammers are using the most trusted faces in the country to drain the savings of the most vulnerable people in it.
AI expert Mohit Rajhans said what nobody at Facebook will say out loud. The platforms are making money from these scam ads. It is a revenue stream for them.
Canada has no law requiring platforms to remove deepfake content on any set timeline. Bill C-34, the legislation that was supposed to address online harms, is still sitting at first reading. The government has been promising online safety legislation for three years.
Judy Skene lost $900,000 waiting for that promise to become a law.
The people calling her greedy in the comments should ask themselves one question. What would they say if it was their grandmother?
That is the Canadian take.
Until next time,
Dean.
P.S. Do you have an elderly parent or grandparent on Facebook right now? Have you ever talked to them about what these scams look like? Hit reply and tell me.