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NOPE
Low reported severity

Southampton resident reports about five months of AI-generated celebrity persona messages and a £200 gift-card payment

The Daily Echo (29 June 2025), the Daily Mail (1 July 2025), and The Sun and the New York Post (2 July 2025) reported that a Southampton resident said the resident had been 'relentlessly' sent AI-generated or doctored celebrity images and videos on Facebook for about five months, with a fake prize certificate and requests for an activation fee to unlock a prize of £500,000 and a car. The resident said one persona presented as a celebrity said she loved the resident and asked for money, and that the resident paid £200 in Apple gift cards. The resident also said the messages were affecting the resident's mental health and said an acquaintance had lost over £1,000 to the same kind of scam (second-hand, not counted here). A University of Southampton AI expert described the messages as a phishing scam using an AI-generated prize certificate. All outlets rest on the resident's own account, and none reports verifying the messages. The start date is not established.

AI system
Unidentified image and video tool
Occurred
Event date unknown
Reported
29 June 2025
Event location
Unknown
What the AI did
Communicated with the person
Reported harm
Financial LossPsychological Distress
Whose AI use
Someone else’s AI use
Setting
Finance · Everyday life
Evidence
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources, 1 underlying account
4 claims: 4 reported. 5 open questions
People reported harmed
At least 1 person

AI system as recorded: Unidentified generative AI image and video tools (reported by the resident and an expert)

Reported harm

The resident reported paying £200 in Apple gift cards to a persona presented as a celebrity, and said the ongoing messages were affecting the resident's mental health. Both statements are the resident's own account. No independent record of the payment or of any health effect was inspected.

What remains unknown

  • The start date of the messages is not stated. The resident is quoted as saying it had been going on for about five months and no outlet gives the interview date, so the calendar start is not established.
  • The outlets reproduce material supplied by the resident and none reports verifying the messages, videos or images. No AI tool or account is identified.
  • The £200 payment and the mental-health effect are the resident's statements. No record was inspected.
  • The resident said an acquaintance lost over a thousand pounds in gift cards to these scams. No detail or independent source is given, so that person is not counted.
  • The four outlets appear to share the resident's single interview with a local news agency. Whether the Daily Mail conducted its own interview is not stated, so all outlets are treated as one chain.

What the evidence supports

AI involvement: reported. The resident described the videos as AI-generated and a University of Southampton AI expert described the prize certificate as generated by a neural network. No outlet reports verifying the messages or identifies any AI tool. Two of the persona claims (a driving licence image and audio clips) are described by the outlets without an AI attribution specific to them.

4 claims: 4 reported. What the statuses mean

Reported A Southampton resident reported being sent, over about five months, AI-generated or doctored images and videos presenting several celebrity personas, together with a fake prize certificate and a request for an activation fee to unlock a prize of £500,000 and a car.

Causal attribution. The resident's own account as told to a local news agency and repeated by the other outlets. The outlets reproduce material supplied by the resident and do not report verifying it. The AI generation is the resident's description and the description of a university AI expert who commented on the prize certificate.

Reported The resident paid £200 in non-refundable Apple gift cards to a persona presented as a celebrity who said she loved the resident and asked for money.

Causal attribution. The resident's own account. The payment is stated by the resident and repeated by the other outlets. No bank, gift card or platform record was inspected.

Reported The resident said the scam messages were affecting the resident's mental health and that the resident could not keep taking that sort of hit.

Causal attribution. The resident's statement. No clinical or other independent source is cited and the outlets do not establish that the messages caused any change in the resident's health.

Reported A University of Southampton AI expert told the outlets that the messages were a phishing scam using a neural-network-generated prize certificate to obtain personal information such as a home address.

Causal attribution. The expert's general description of this type of scam. The expert is not reported as having examined the resident's messages beyond the prize certificate described.

Sources

4 sources inspected, from 1 underlying account. Sources that repeat one account do not corroborate each other.

How the sources were read, and where the events happened

Read through an Internet Archive capture (about 8,000 characters, complete article text). Applies to s2.

Rewrite that cites The Sun. Applies to s4.

Event countries: Unknown. Affected-person countries: United Kingdom. Court countries: Unknown.

The outlets state the resident is based in Southampton and call the resident a Brit. The messages arrived on Facebook and the country where the resident received them is not stated, so the event country is left unknown. No country is inferred from an outlet.

Reviewed for publication 2026-09-29: A resident of Southampton described the experience to a local news agency and several outlets repeated it. All claims are attributed to that account. The resident is not named and the celebrities depicted are not named in public fields because none of them spoke about this event. Detail is limited to what states the harm. The start date is not established, so the case is published undated.

People reported harmed in this case

At least 1 person

0 AI participants · 1 other person harmed

One resident reports paying £200 and reports mental-health effects. An acquaintance reportedly lost over £1,000 to the same kind of scam, stated second-hand by the resident with no detail, so that person is not counted. The celebrities depicted are not reported harmed and are not counted. Other people sent similar messages are not counted.

Counted once within this case. The same person may appear in other cases. This count does not establish AI causation.

Cite this case

Compiled per our published methodology: verification statuses, sourcing standards, and corrections process.

APA

NOPE. (2026). Southampton resident reports about five months of AI-generated celebrity persona messages and a £200 gift-card payment. AI incidents. https://nope.net/incidents/2025-southampton-uk-reported-ai-celebrity-persona-messages-gift-card-payment

BibTeX

@misc{2025_southampton_uk_reported_ai_celebrity_persona_messages_gift_card_payment,
  title = {Southampton resident reports about five months of AI-generated celebrity persona messages and a £200 gift-card payment},
  author = {NOPE},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {AI incidents},
  url = {https://nope.net/incidents/2025-southampton-uk-reported-ai-celebrity-persona-messages-gift-card-payment}
}

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