Alert for a fake video of Messi promoting an app to earn money: it’s a scam with “deepfakes”

In recent days a fraudulent video has begun to circulate (deepfake) where you can see Lionel Messi promoting an application called “Wild Dive”: The footballer “says” it is one of his main sources of income and claims to have helped thousands of people make money.

This content, which circulates on Instagram, uses fragments of a real interview that the footballer gave to the Argentine streaming program a few months ago “Olga”.

Both the interviewer’s and the footballer’s voices are present in the altered video artificially modified to make viewers believe they are witnessing a real promotion of the app.

Furthermore, scammers use two other strategies to reinforce this false belief: The footballer mentions something else sources of income like advertising contracts with well-known brands, which is true.

Furthermore, they show advertising videos while the player speaks, to prevent the user from noticing the differences between the voice and the movement of the lips of the people involved and thus detect the scam.

According to ESET’s cybersecurity team, which investigated the case, the app is only available on the Apple Store. While the chances of getting any kind of “prize” are practically nil and the chances of recovering any investment you make in Wildcat Dive are extremely low.

The results of their analysis confirm complaints included in reviews of the application in the Apple App Store, where affected users report the inability to recover their money and condemn the application as fraudulent.

Although the current version of the application it does not work Once downloaded, the description and images shown in the store provide no further information, the reviews mention some interesting features. According to them, the game has betting features that allow users to invest money and profit from it.

However, the application has more surprising reviews: coming from suspicious users, with writing and punctuation errors. This may indicate that some of them were written unfairly.

Reviews offering a lower rating indicate that the application is fraudulent and does not allow withdrawal of invested money.

More deceptions with Messi

A program called Hey Gen A video of Lionel Messi has gone viral “speaking in English: This is a deepfake, that is, material curated by artificial intelligence that takes your voice and synchronizes it perfectly with the lips of the national team’s number 10.

It is known in football circles that, since Messi lived most of his life in Argentina and Spain, he never had the need to learn new languages. He has demonstrated this during his stay in France over the last two years, as he is currently doing in the United States as well.

Social networks began showing a video of when Leo gave his first conference at Inter Miami, surprisingly speaking in English, a fact that caught several users off guard before they recognized that it was a job done by the Intelligence Artificial.