How to Avoid Getting Duped by a Deepfake

Seeing is No Longer Believing: Navigating the Deepfake Threat

The rise of generative AI has ushered in a new era of social engineering: the Deepfake. These AI-crafted videos, images, and audio clips are designed to bypass our most basic instinct—trusting what we see and hear. For security awareness professionals, this means we can no longer rely solely on traditional “red flag” training. We must teach our teams to be skeptical of the medium itself.

From CEO impersonations that lead to massive fraudulent transfers to fake celebrity endorsements for crypto scams, deepfakes are becoming the preferred tool for high-stakes fraud. By integrating deepfake detection into our training, we help employees recognize that in the age of AI, authenticity must be verified, not assumed.

Advice and Guidance to Encourage

To help your workforce defend against these sophisticated digital forgeries, emphasize these critical strategies:

• Identify the “Digital Glitch”: While technology is improving, deepfakes often have subtle tells. Encourage employees to look for unnatural blinking patterns, lip-sync inconsistencies, and strange lighting or shadows around the edges of the face or background.

• The “Out-of-Band” Verification Rule: If a video call or audio message from an executive or vendor requests an urgent financial action, the response should always be a “call-back” to a known, trusted number. Never rely on the incoming channel alone for verification.

• Listen for Audio Artifacts: Deepfake audio can sound robotic or have unnatural pauses. Advise employees to listen for background noise inconsistencies or sudden changes in audio quality, which often signal a manipulated recording.

• Challenge the Context: If a request is completely out of character for the sender—such as a CFO asking for a confidential transfer via an unexpected video meeting—it should be treated as high-risk. Teach employees to ask a specific, personal question that a bot or a recording couldn’t answer.

• Practice “Privacy First” Habits: Scammers need source material to create deepfakes. Encourage employees to limit public sharing of high-quality video and audio on social media, as this reduces the data available for threat actors to clone their likeness.

By turning these detection tips into a routine part of your organization’s security culture, you ensure your “human firewall” is ready for the next generation of AI-driven attacks.

Read the full guide on avoiding deepfake scams here: How to Avoid Getting Duped by a Deepfake