Mumbai police say ad agency staff let fraudsters run deepfake videos of a stock market analyst as investment ads; four arrested
Mumbai's West Region cyber police arrested four employees of Valueleaf, a Bengaluru-based digital advertising company, in October 2025, saying they had given Chinese fraudsters access to the company's Meta advertising IDs, which were used to run Facebook and Instagram ads with deepfake videos of stock market analysts and business news anchors. The case began with a complaint from a SEBI-registered research analyst who appears on television and found deepfake videos of himself in the ads; according to the complaint, the videos were created from his appearances on business news channels. Police say viewers who clicked were added to WhatsApp groups offering share tips, invested through fake trading apps, were shown large profits and could not withdraw their money; the deputy commissioner said several people were cheated and several cases registered. A police official said Meta had flagged the videos as deepfakes. Lokmat Times reports that the videos circulated from 1 to 18 July 2025 before Meta removed them. Police say the company received about Rs 3 crore. The four were booked for offences including cheating by personation and forgery and remanded in police custody; they reportedly said they did not know their services were being used for fraud. The analyst is not named in the sources, and how the videos were made is not described.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 31/10/2026