With the constantly growing danger of scams and fraud in the financial industry, particularly those targeting unsuspecting retail investors, Santander came up with a new campaign to demonstrate the danger and capabilities of deepfakes.

The bank created and shared deepfake videos similar to the other ones circulating on social media platforms. Santander’s version features a well-known “finfluencer” Mr Money Jar and the bank’s own fraud lead Chris Ainsley to show how realistic deepfakes already are.

Its goal is to educate UK citizens and provide some insight into what they might expect to encounter from other scams that use similar means.

The bank decided to take this approach as more than half of Brits (53%) have little to no experience with deepfakes. They have either never even heard of the term ‘deepfake,’ or they misunderstood what it is, according to new research. The same research shows that only 17% of Brits are confident they can easily identify a deepfake video.

Santander expects a surge in scam reports involving deepfakes

Santander’s customers remain in danger of losing money to these and other scams. For example, last year in May, one of the bank’s users lost £60,000 after transferring funds to a criminal who impersonated the bank’s head of fraud, Chris Ainsley.

While this was a more traditional impersonation scam, Ainsley believes that the ability to create and use deepfakes could pose an even greater risk to the bank’s customers. Commenting on the matter, he highlighted that Generative AI (GenAI) is developing at breakneck speed, and that it is only a matter of “when,” rather than “if” there will be an influx of scams conducted through the use of deepfakes.

“We already know fraudsters flood social media with fake investment opportunities and bogus love interests, and unfortunately, it’s highly likely that deepfakes will begin to be used to create even more convincing scams of these types,” he warned.

With that being the case, Ainsley stressed that it is more important than ever for people to be on their guard at all times. Just because something might appear legitimate at first sight, it doesn’t mean it really is. This is Santander’s motivation for the new campaign — to point out the dangers and telltale signs of deepfakes and scams, and educate the public as much as possible by training its members to recognize such signs.

“Look out for those telltale signs and if something – or someone – appears too good to be true, it’s probably just that,” he said.