Michael Mosley and other trusted TV documentaries are increasingly being used as ‘deepfakes’ for health fraud, report says

It’s almost too good to be true. A doctor you’ve seen on TV for decades, who’s on social media advocating a new revolutionary product that the pharmaceutical industry hopes you won’t find out about and that can cure your ailments.

But all is not as it seems. Scammers are increasingly using AI technology to create fake videos of celebrity TV doctors like Hilary Jones, Michael Mosley and Rangan Chatterjee to push their products on unsuspecting citizens on social media.

A new report published in the prestigious journal British medical journal (BMJ) warns of the increasing rise of so-called ‘deepfakes’.

Deepfaking uses artificial intelligence (AI) to project a digital likeness of a real human onto a video of a body that is not their own.

They have been used to make videos of politicians look incompetent, and even for corporate raids. Now they are being used to sell you shady “cures.”

Scammers are increasingly using AI technology to create fake videos of celebrity TV doctors like Hilary Jones, Michael Moseley and Rangan Chatterjee, in order to sell their products to unsuspecting citizens on social media.

Dr. Jones is just one of the TV doctors who is joining in on the trend. Earlier this year, a deepfake video of him promoting a drug for high blood pressure spread on Facebook.

And as Dr. Jones himself knows, this is certainly not the only example.

“Some of the products currently being promoted under my name include products that claim to help blood pressure and diabetes, and hemp gummies with names like Via Hemp Gummies, Bouncy Nutrition and Eco Health,” she said.

Health guru Dr Mosley, who died in Greece last month, and Dr Chatterjee from Doctor In The House have also been used to make such clips.

Although the technology used to create deepfakes has been around for years, early versions were flawed. They often made mistakes with ears and fingers or didn’t match the audio and lip movements of the person in question, which didn’t alert people to their fraudulent nature.

But great strides have been made since then and while research on the subject is still limited, data shows that about half of people have difficulty distinguishing them from the real thing.

Retired doctor John Cormack, who worked with BMJ on the report, described scammers who use the reputations of respected doctors to sell their products as “money printing”.

“The bottom line is that it’s a lot cheaper to spend your money on making videos than it is on research, coming up with new products and bringing them to market the conventional way,” he said.

Regulators also seem unable to stop this trend.

Practising doctors in the UK must be registered with the General Medical Council. If a doctor is found to have breached the standards that apply to medical professionals, the council can suspend or even disbar him or her.

Scammers are also using the voice and image of Mail health guru Dr Michael Mosley, who died in Greece last month, to promote their products

However, they have no power to take action against fake videos of doctors. And while impersonating a doctor is a criminal offence in the UK, the murky world of the internet makes it virtually impossible to find out who is responsible for the video, especially if that person lives abroad.

Doctors like Dr. Jones, on the other hand, say it is the social media giants who host and ultimately monetize this content that need to take action.

“It is up to parties like Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, to prevent this,” he said.

“But as long as they’re making money, they don’t care.”

In response to the BMJ report, a Meta spokesperson said: We will investigate the examples BMJ raises.

We don’t allow content that is intentionally misleading or attempts to deceive others, and we’re continually working to improve our detection and enforcement.

“We encourage anyone who sees content that may violate our policies to report it so we can investigate and take action.”

At this point, doctors like Dr. Jones must take matters into their own hands.

Dr. Jones, a frequent guest on shows like Lorraine, hires a company to map deepfakes with him and remove them from the internet.

But he added that the scale of the problem only appears to be growing.

Dr. Rangan Chatterjee, known for the BBC documentary Doctor In The House, has also joined the trend

“There has been a huge increase in this kind of activity,” he said.

“Even if they are removed, they will reappear the next day under a different name.”

The report concludes that deepfakes are so insidious because they play on people’s trust, using a familiar face who has a history of giving good, sometimes life-changing, health advice to scam worried patients.

People who see a video they suspect is a deepfake are advised to carefully review it first to avoid a “boy who cried wolf” scenario.

If they are still suspicious, try contacting the person seen in the video yourself, perhaps through a verified account.

If you are still suspicious, consider leaving a comment questioning its veracity, and hopefully prompting others to take that extra step in their analysis.

People can also use social media’s built-in reporting tools to flag both the video and the person who posted it so it can be removed.