Crypto scammers deepfaked Nvidia's CEO during livestream


Criminals have once again proven their aptitude for using deepfakes to scam people out of their crypto assets. This time, they targeted the CEO of the world's most valuable company, Nvidia.

Earlier this week, Jensen Huang was presenting his keynote and announcing a major investment in Finland's telco Nokia when criminals hijacked the livestream and promoted a crypto scam.

Dylan Martin, a semiconductor industry-focused journalist, was the first to catch the deepfake, even transcribing the fake speech on "a crypto mass adoption."

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The deepfaked CEO touted Nvidia's GPUs as being used by the blockchain industry, adding that it makes "perfect sense" for the company to launch a "crypto distribution where you send one of the supportive crypto currencies," and urged viewers to scan a malicious QR code to participate in the scam campaign.

Meanwhile, multiple other observers have noted that the fake livestream on the NVIDIA LIVE channel was watched by far more people than the original one. While the reported numbers vary, the original keynote got fewer than 20,000 viewers, while the fake one managed to gather over 100,000 viewers before it was taken down by YouTube.

According to Martin, the fake video was the top result on YouTube for "nvidia gtc dc," while the real stream appeared below.

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"YouTube presenting the first result for 'nvidia live,' a crypto scam, is a shame and shows how deeply social media is infiltrated," X account @TPatroi reacted.

While the extent of the scam is unknown, some observers suggested that the criminals managed to steal at least $115,000 worth of crypto assets, while CNBC apparently also showed the fake video.

The US-based chipmaker Nvidia is now the largest company in the world by market capitalization, having recently surpassed $5 trillion.

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