I’ve written and spoken extensively about my problems with romance scammers, criminals who have used my photos (and the photos of many others) to create fake profiles and trick victims into sending them significant amounts of money. In my research, I’ve learned that many potential victims ask for a video chat with scammers as a way for them to prove their identities. In fact, participating in a video chat and then asking supposed suitors to perform particular actions on request (e.g., hold up two fingers on your left hand) is often touted on anti-scammer sites as a way to ensure that the person that you are talking to is in fact who they say they are and not a scammer who may be using recorded video as their video source (a common and frightening possibility).

Well, verifying identity online has just become even more complex. As you have already likely discovered, there are a number of freely available apps (e.g., Snapchat, FaceSwap Live, MSQRD) that allow for live face-swapping. In fact, MSQRD was recently purchased by Facebook, and there have been suggestions that face-swapping could become more directly integrated into the social network. If you have used one of these apps, you’ll likely agree that face-swapping can be a lot of fun, but these are fairly touchy/glitchy apps and their use could be easily detected. However, this may not be the case for long.

Researchers from Stanford University recently released a project that works to “animate the facial expressions of the target video by a source actor and re-renders the manipulated output video in a photo-realistic fashion.” The results are incredible, but the implications for identity theft are incredibly frightening, in effect allowing scammers to become puppet masters who manipulate the faces and bodies of their fake profile avatars. Takes the idea of “authentic identity” to a whole new level, doesn’t it?