20 Jul 2026BangladeshUnidentified voice-cloning tool
According to a press release from Special Response Battalion-13 (SRB-13), relayed by Ajker Patrika, DBC News and NTV, on 20 July 2026 a man who works at the Natore Sadar upazila health complex received a call saying that his younger son had been arrested by police with drugs. The callers then used AI to imitate the son's voice so that the father believed the story, and demanded money to get the son released. He sent a total of Tk 40,000 in two payments through the mobile financial service Nagad, and realised it was a fraud when he reached his son directly. He filed a fraud case at Natore Sadar police station on 25 September 2026. That evening SRB-13 arrested two men, described as the ring's leader and an associate, at their homes in Gobindaganj, Gaibandha, seizing nine mobile phones, a passport and Tk 14,100 in cash; SRB says they admitted involvement during initial questioning and handed them to the police for further legal action, and NTV reports they were sent to Gaibandha district jail through the court on 26 September.
Core concern Low reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/10/2026
17 Jan 2026GermanyUnidentified video tool
Welt, dpa (in Tagesspiegel, news.de and t-online) and a press release of the CDU parliamentary group in the Lower Saxony state parliament report the following. On 17 January 2026 an employee of the parliamentary group posted a short AI-generated video showing a colleague in a sexualized manner in a private WhatsApp group connected to the group's staff. The Hannover public prosecutor's office had viewed the video, and a spokesperson said it was obviously an AI montage. After the group's leaders were informed (on 27 March according to press reports), the employee who created the video was dismissed without notice and a second employee, who had reportedly asked chat members in January to delete the video and keep silent, was suspended. The group informed the prosecutor's office, which said, as reported on 1 April 2026, that it had received no criminal complaint. On 9 July 2026 dpa reported, citing the prosecutor's office, that the Wennigsen local court had fined the former employee, who had made the video with the colleague's picture without consent and shared it in a chat group, 30 daily rates for a violation of the Kunsturhebergesetz, and that the decision is final. NDR reported on 10 April 2026 that the depicted employee had filed a criminal complaint, that the prosecutor's office had received the employee's application for prosecution, and that the employee did not want to comment publicly. The colleague and the former employee are not named.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 4 underlying accounts · Added 30/09/2026
23 Mar 2026 to 24 Mar 2026United StatesUnidentified voice-cloning tool
The Spokesman-Review (8 May 2026) reported that a 75-year-old man in Washington state took a call on Monday 23 March in which a crying voice presented as the man's adult daughter said an accident had happened and asked for help. Male voices then described a collision and said the daughter had been taken hostage. The newspaper states that the daughter's voice on the call was an AI-generated copy and that investigators later surmised the callers used a recording of the daughter's voice with a program that mimicked the speech pattern. Over about 30 hours the callers directed the man to banks and stores in Washington and Idaho, where $13,000 was wired. The man was about to withdraw $17,000 when a bank employee stalled and police were alerted, and police then reached the daughter, who confirmed being at home and safe. The newspaper says none of the wired money had been recovered when the article was published. The man says it took days to start feeling normal again. The report rests on the man's account, a bank employee's account and a police report quoted by the newspaper. The article gives the call date as Monday 23 March without a year. The record uses 2026 because 23 March fell on a Monday only in 2026 among the years 2023 to 2026. The range starts at 2023 because the article says the Federal Trade Commission began warning about AI voice-copy scams as early as 2023, and it ends at 2026 because the article was published on 8 May 2026.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 30/09/2026
Feb 2026Event location unknownClaude Cowork
In February 2026 Nick Davidov, a venture capitalist, posted on X that Anthropic's Claude Cowork agent, which he had asked to organise his wife's desktop, deleted a folder holding all the photos his wife had taken on her camera over the previous 15 years. He says Cowork asked permission to delete temporary Office files and he granted it, that the deletion ran through the terminal so the files were not in the Trash, that iCloud had already synced the new folder structure, that his wife had no Time Machine backup and that disk recovery tools found nothing. Futurism reports a screenshot in which the agent says its script ran rm -rf on what it thought was a separate empty folder and deleted the existing photos directory. Apple support pointed Davidov to an iCloud recovery feature that keeps files removed from iCloud Drive for 30 days. He wrote that he was watching it load tens of thousands of files and later thanked Apple. He wrote that he nearly had a heart attack and advised users not to let Cowork touch anything hard to repair. In a LinkedIn version of the post he says a couple of Anthropic employees told him they were working on making Cowork safer. Every account traces to Davidov's own posts.
Core concern Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 6 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 29/09/2026
Feb 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI writing and image tools
In February 2026 Insider Gaming and the A.V. Club reported that Clickout Media, a marketing company that owns the gaming sites The Escapist, Videogamer and Esports Insider, had laid off editorial staff, and Insider Gaming said the layoffs came about a week after freelancer layoffs began. Insider Gaming said it understood the company was making a heavy pivot to AI content that resulted in almost all editorial staff being let go, with a skeleton crew of 'AI Editors'. Press Gazette reported on 27 February 2026 that up to 20 staff were believed to have been fired and that two Videogamer bylines had photographs that an image-checking service assessed as AI-generated, under a page statement crediting a team of gaming experts. Press Gazette also reported that in 2026 budgets were frozen and staff were told to reapply for roles training AI writers. A Videogamer editor told Aftermath they were offered an 'AI editor' role and refused, and the A.V. Club reported that editor posted that they and their team were laid off. An Escapist writer said their role was up for redundancy. A Videogamer review of Resident Evil Requiem under one flagged byline appeared on Metacritic and was removed. Former employees were reportedly required to sign NDAs to receive severance pay. Clickout Media had not responded to Insider Gaming or Press Gazette at publication, and Aftermath reported no response to its questions about AI-generated author images. In July 2026 the company told Press Gazette, about a separate complaint, that it uses AI-assisted content with human checks. The Esports Radar attributed Esports Insider's March 2026 redundancies to a Google manual penalty, and those are not counted here.
Core concern Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 7 sources, 6 underlying accounts · Added 29/09/2026
11 Sept 2026 to 23 Sept 2026United States, CanadaChatGPT
The chief executive of Family First Credit Union in Saginaw, Michigan, told WJRT (ABC12) that before boarding a flight to Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 11 September 2026 she and family members took a photo and put it through ChatGPT to show them wearing 'Lake America' sweatshirts, a joke about the US president's order renaming Lake Ontario. She posted it to her private Facebook page with a marker saying it contained AI content; her sister reposted it publicly without the marker while they were in Halifax, and it spread in Canada as if the family had worn the shirts. The backlash concerned the image's political message; she said she would understand the anger of anyone in Halifax who thought the family had walked in wearing those sweatshirts. She said she was getting death threats and the family returned early; by 16 September she was back in the US. She called the post poor judgment, said she would not use AI again and that AI 'can make people think something's real that's not'. On 23 September the credit union said she was no longer an employee, effective immediately; it has not said whether she resigned or was dismissed, or why.
Core concern Medium reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution unclear · 5 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/09/2026
4 Jan 2026IndiaUnidentified image tool
From 4 January 2026 several employees of a Chennai company received follow requests from unknown Instagram accounts that then circulated defamatory content, including obscene AI-morphed images of a senior woman employee. On her complaint the State Cyber Crime Investigation Centre of the Tamil Nadu police traced the digital footprints, social-media activity and IP logs to a former employee of the same company who had resigned in October 2025 and, according to police, acted out of resentment and previous enmity to threaten, harass and publicly humiliate the victim; she had taken the photographs from the company's official website and morphed them using various artificial-intelligence applications. She was arrested, produced before a magistrate and remanded in judicial custody; the police press release was reported on 4 and 5 February 2026 and the cyber-crime DGP issued a public warning about social-media misuse. The victim alleged the images were circulated to damage her reputation and cause mental distress.
Core concern High reported severity Criminal Charges
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 15/06/2026