Two and a half months after the death of Alain Delon, his eldest son spoke out to denounce a scam.
Anthony Delon warns of alleged paid visits to the Douchy estate (Loiret), where his father lived, offered by the holder of a Facebook account usurping his identity.
A well-established practice that affects more and more celebrities.
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Alain Delon is dead: the myth of cinema has died out at 88
“If I speak today, it is because I think there is a serious problem,” launches Anthony Delon in front of the camera, in a video published on Instagram. Since its ownership of “The Brûlerie” in Douchy, where his father Alain Delon died on August 8, the actor denounces a scam. For more than a year, his identity has been stolen on Facebook. Via this fake account followed by 8,000 people, a scammer contacted several fans, offering them a guided tour of the Delon family home.
“In recent months, this individual would have probably directed more gullible people to a Messenger link and then to a Telegram number. He would have managed to obtain 500 euros from certain people to supposedly come and meet me in Douchy,” says Anthony Delon in his video, which can be found above.
Scams often in the form of “deepfake”
Some scammers go further, using artificial intelligence. They can pose as celebrities, then extract money from Internet users. Latest scam to date: after the death of Alain Delon, a video claiming to show a posthumous message from the actor was broadcast. We hear him proposing to distribute part of his inheritance using an online application. If it is indeed his face and his voice, the actor never uttered these words, in reality generated by artificial intelligence capable of learning the movements and voice of a person in order to reproduce them . This is what we call “deepfake”.
Last August, Florent Pagny also denounced the theft of his identity using artificial intelligence to extract money from his fans. To avoid being fooled, it is therefore important to carefully observe the face of the celebrity in question. “We see that sometimes the lips are a little blurry”, indicates Victor Baait, an artificial intelligence teacher who has identified more than 400 fake videos using celebrities, often accompanied by fake extracts from television channels.
“Why are the lips blurred? Quite simply because in these tools, they take a video that exists, and they will transform the lips to match a text”, explains the specialist, interviewed in the report at the top of this article.
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Anthony Delon, who specifies that he only has Instagram and no Facebook account, announced in his video that he would file a complaint. “If you have been a victim of this scam, you must file a complaint with the relevant and competent authorities,” also specifies the actor, before concluding: “We live in a strange world.”
