Abigail Ruvalcaba was intrigued when a handsome daytime soap opera actor she’d been watching for years reached out to her in a Facebook message.
His rugged exterior softened by his piercing blue eyes and an almost shy smile disarmed her. She answered him, pushing away any doubts as to why the Emmy winner would suddenly contact her.
They talked on the phone. He sent her videos professing his love for her. They made plans to buy a beach house so they could start their lives together.
The problem was she was making plans not with “General Hospital” star Steve Burton, but with a scammer who intended not to romance her, but to swindle her. In the end, the scheme led Ruvalcaba to sell her home to send money to the bad actors.
Fraudsters using promises of love and companionship to cheat the lonely is a crime as old as Victorian novels.
But the rapidly advancing world of artificial intelligence and deepfakes has given scammers powerful new weapons. And increasingly, they are using the likenesses of celebrities like Burton to lure victims.
Burton had no idea this exchange was taking place but said he has had numerous encounters over the last few years in which strangers approach him and insisted they have been chatting.
“I get a thousand messages a day and 100 of them are people who think they’re talking to me on other apps—Telegram, WhatsApp—my agent, my manager, my publicist, nobody will be reaching out to you,” Burton said in a Facebook video warning his fans of such scams. “Please be careful. You are not speaking to me anywhere unless I message you back from my Instagram @1steveburton.”
In 2023, nearly 65,000 people reported being a victim of a romance scam with reported losses reaching a staggering $1.14 billion, according to the Federal Trade Commission. The use of artificial intelligence has only made the swindle easier. Now, thieves can pretend to be nearly anyone with a large enough digital footprint, including celebrities whose voices and likeness are widely accessible.
And experts say situations where scammers pretend to be celebrities to extract money from well-meaning fans are far from rare.
“Even if you don’t want a Cinderella story, you can’t deny that a Cinderella story would be nice,” said Ally Armeson, the executive director of the nonprofit FightCybercrime.org. “You may not be yearning for it, but I would be hard-pressed to point to a person that wouldn’t want to be adored by a celebrity.”
Last year, YouTube deleted thousands of AI videos on its platform that purported to show Taylor Swift, Joe Rogan and Steve Harvey pitching a Medicare scam.
Harvey told CNN this year that scams using his likeness are at an “all-time high.”
“I prided myself on my brand being one of authenticity, and people know that, and so they take the fact that I’m known and trusted as an authentic person, pretty sincere,” the “Family Feud” host told the outlet. “My concern now is the people that it affects. I don’t want fans of mine or people who aren’t fans to be hurt by something.”
In 2024, a San Diego woman lost her life savings to a scammer pretending to be actor Keanu Reeves. Earlier this year, a French woman came forward publicly to say she had lost $855,000 to a scammer who used AI-generated content while pretending to be Brad Pitt. She faced such an intense barrage of criticism online that the network that aired the interview with her took it down.
Armeson said her organization has helped victims whose scammers were portraying public figures who included Elon Musk, Britney Spears, Mila Kunis, Brad Pitt, Trace Adkins, Jelly Roll and, before his death, Val Kilmer.
In April, a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers introduced the NO FAKES Act, which aims to protect the voice and likeness of individuals from computer-generated re-creations from generative AI and other technology.
Celebrities have even gone as far as to warn their fans not to trust any communication from them that comes from social media.
Those who work with victims of internet crimes say the thieves prey on people’s most basic desires: to be loved. By the time Ruvalcaba realized she was ensnared in an elaborate romance scam bolstered by the use of artificial intelligence, she had lost nearly everything.
“I was in a fantasy world. He had an answer for everything,” Ruvalcaba, 66, said in an interview with The Times. “I’m devastated, obviously, and I feel stupid. I should have known better.”
Ruvalcaba, a mother of two adult children, spent decades working as an accountant until 2017, when she became permanently disabled because of complications arising from Bipolar 1 Disorder.
Her daughter, Vivian Ruvalcaba, believes her mother was experiencing mania during much of the interactions with the person she thought was Burton, allowing her to fall deeper into the sham relationship. Their conversations, which initially began on Facebook around October 2024, moved to the encrypted messaging app WhatsApp.
Soon after, the thief began asking her for money for what he said were management expenses and to fund the purchase of the home they would share. Ruvalcaba is still married to the father of her children but longed for the excitement that comes from a new relationship.
In September, she sent the person pretending to be Burton $27,500, according to a police report.
Still, the scammer wanted more.
In the months that followed, she sent Bitcoin and gift cards ranging from $50 to $500. By early this year, she had sent the scammer a total of $81,000, according to her family.
As she transferred cash, he sent her messages reassuring her of his commitment to their relationship. One video reviewed by The Times shows a supposed Burton wearing a backward hat and black T-shirt while sitting in a car.
Experts say the video is a deepfake, a manipulated piece of content created using artificial intelligence to depict Burton saying things he never did. The scammers appear to have taken the video Burton recorded in May warning fans of scams, changed the audio—still using his voice—and altered his mouth movements to match.
“I love you so much, darling,” the video states. “I had to make this video to make you happy, my love. I hope this puts a smile on your heart. Know that nothing will ever make me hurt you or lie to you, my queen.”
The audio in the video, only about 11 seconds long, is clear, but slightly robotic. The technology used to alter the actor’s mouth left it with an almost airbrushed appearance — a tell for those with experience with AI — but probably not significant enough for the average person to immediately tell it has been manipulated.
In the world of online crimes, romance scams involving celebrities are far from the most popular, but they can be catastrophic.
Scams in which a person is seeking a few hundred dollars or personal information that can be sold on the dark web are operated on a wider scale and at a much faster pace and frequently have more victims. Romance scams take longer but are more fruitful for the thief, said Steve Grobman, executive vice president and chief technology officer at McAfee.
“A typical romance scam might require a scammer to engage with a victim for weeks and have many, many conversations to build that level of emotional trust before they pivot to capitalize on cashing out,” Grobman said.
And it has never been easier to pretend to be someone else.
“The advancement in AI image creation and video has made it such that the scammers now can not only project themselves as a persona using text, they can send images or videos in whatever location they choose,” he said.
Although someone perpetuating a romance scam can go after any age group, often older individuals who have built up significant retirement accounts and may be less familiar with AI and deepfake technology are targeted. Median losses per person are around $2,000 — the highest amount reported for any type of impostor scam, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
Another victim of a celebrity scam, a woman in her 70s, who spoke to The Times on condition of anonymity, said she lost her entire retirement savings over the course of several years after a scammer posing as a celebrity convinced her to take advantage of what she thought was an investment opportunity.
The person sent her videos and photos that she thought at the time looked real. The truth, she said, is that anyone can be a victim.
“I consider myself a bright person,” she said. “And I’ve struggled to understand how I could do something like this. But these scammers are smart people and they have you convinced about everything. It’s unbelievable.”
At a time when so many relationships begin in the digital world, it can be easy to fall victim to someone with nefarious intentions. But experts say the best protection is to remain skeptical of online relationships.
Video chats, other online interactions and even phone calls can be manipulated into something else with technology and have become very convincing, said Iskander Sanchez-Rola, director of AI and Innovation at Norton Research Group.
There are a few ways eagle-eyed consumers can spot a deepfake, according to Norton. People should watch out for unnatural eye movements and facial expressions, hair that seems a bit too perfect and an absence of an outline of individual teeth.
A mismatch of emotion between the words a person is speaking and their facial expression can also be a red flag, along with abnormal skin tones, discoloration, strange lighting and shadows that don’t match up with the scene.
Experts say consumers can protect themselves by conducting reverse image searches on content that is sent to them to see whether there are any similar videos online to help determine if an image or video has been altered.
But the best protection may be bringing a healthy dose of skepticism to anything sent online to you from someone you don’t know IRL (in real life).
“If a celebrity that you admire slides into your DMs, the first thing to assume is that it’s a scam,” Sanchez-Rola said. “And if the celebrity sends you a love note asking for money. Stop. That’s not love. That’s a deepfake.”
Scammers will often urge victims to keep their relationship a secret in an effort to prevent family and friends from intervening and stopping the flow of cash, according to experts.
In February, Vivian Ruvalcaba started to get suspicious about her mother’s spending after her son told her that his grandmother had asked him to take her to buy a $500 gift card for “a friend.” Around the same time, her father noticed transactions for money orders that had been taken out of their account.
When she confronted her mother about the missing funds, she confessed to the love affair. Vivian Ruvalcaba watched the video supposedly of Burton and felt sick.
She immediately knew it was the work of AI. She chastised her mother for sending money to a stranger, but Ruvalcaba was certain the man she was speaking to was the actor she’d watched on television for so many years.
“I’m like, Mom, you can’t send people that you don’t know money,” Vivian Ruvalcaba recalled telling her mother. “And she said: I know him. He’s Steve Burton. How are you gonna tell me that’s not him? It’s his voice. It’s his face. I watch him on TV all the time.”
“I told her, if it really was him wouldn’t you think that he’d be sending you money, not the other way around,” Vivian said.
What Vivian didn’t realize at the time was that the scammer had been pushing her mother to sell her Harbor City condominium, which she’d owned since 1999.
Without telling her family, Ruvalcaba sold the two-bedroom, two-bathroom condo to Seller’s New Day, a wholesale real estate company, for $350,000 — far below market value. Similar condominiums in the area have recently sold for as much as $500,000, according to Zillow.
Vivian Ruvalcaba said she reached out to the house-flipping company that purchased the condo from Seller’s New Day to try to reverse the sale but hasn’t been successful.
Now, she’s fighting to keep her parents home. In July, the family filed a lawsuit to try to stop the transfer of the home. That case is still pending.
J. Scott Souders, an attorney representing Seller’s New Day, said in an email that Ruvalcaba reached out to his clients and was cognizant of the terms of the deal to sell her home. He called the lawsuit “a shakedown for money.”
Ruvalcaba was set to send the scammer $70,000 from the proceeds of the sale, but her daughter stepped in just in time and canceled the transaction.
“That home was supposed to be their security in their golden years,” Vivian Ruvalcaba said. “Now it’s gone.”
The post She thought she talking to her favorite celebrity. It cost her everything appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
