Prosecutors say Malaysia-based ring used AI face-swapping to pose as Japanese police in video calls; eight victims lost about 18.65 million yen
Taiwan's Taichung District Prosecutors Office said in January 2026 that it had indicted members of a fraud ring that operated from a base in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 2025. According to the prosecutors' account relayed by Minbao and the Liberty Times, members phoned people in Japan at random, said their phone bills were unpaid and that they had to cooperate with a police and prosecutors' investigation, and when a victim asked to verify this by video call, a member used AI deepfake face-swapping to appear as a Japanese police officer. Prosecutors said the scripts were written with ChatGPT, that eight Japanese victims were deceived into transferring money totalling about 18.65 million yen, and that the defendants had not compensated them. Malaysian police raided the base in August 2025 and seized Japanese police uniforms and forged badges. Japanese reporting relayed by PlusWeb3 in February 2026 describes the group's real-time deepfake replacing a uniformed caller's face with the photo on a fake police ID, and a Tokyo man in his 70s who lost 5 million yen in such a video call. No verdict is reported in the sources read.
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 28/10/2026