Online scammers in South Africa are riding on the reputations of the national broadcaster and the world’s wealthiest man Elon Musk to promote a “new secret investment”. A video claiming to show Musk presenting an investment platform that is supposedly helping two well-known African billionaires get richer has been viewed thousands of times. However, the video, and others like it, has been edited by manipulating footage of Musk speaking during shareholders’ meetings and various interviews. The sound in these clips has been replaced using audio deepfake technology that can mimic people’s voices.
On December 11, 2023, a Facebook page called “Economic News” published a video in the form of a news bulletin featuring former South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) anchor Francis Herd.
“Elon Musk’s project has scared the government and big banks,” Herd appears to say. “He has come up with a new secret investment that has made hundreds of people very rich.”
The video in the post, which has since been deleted, includes the SABC’s logo and a chyron that reads: “Everyone who invests R4,700 ($253) can earn R300,000 per month ($16,164).”
Immediately after Herd’s introduction, the bulletin cuts to Musk, who was raised in South Africa, speaking at a conference about his “new software worth $5 billion”.
“We have developed a powerful software, it is a world first. I personally spent five billion dollars to develop it over two years. First, I have to prove that it works. Numbers are an easy way to prove something,” Musk appears to say.
“You can expect to make R30,000 as early as day one, it may be much more. You make a small deposit of R4,700 into the algorithm and it automatically starts to increase. Everything is under your control.”
According to the clip, Musk invites online users to sign up for the package, claiming two South African billionaires Nicky Oppenheimer and Anton Rupert have already invested and are “successfully increasing their fortune”.
The same video circulated on YouTube here on November 3, 2023, and here on December 22, 2023.
A version of the same claim featuring Herd but containing different footage of Musk – taken from an interview – was posted on Facebook here.
In this version, the report claims that “shocked” government officials had called the SABC to pull the interview from the air.
This audio script was also used in a video featuring former BBC news anchor Joanna Gosling (here) alongside a clip of Musk onstage at a TED Talk.
However, none of the videos are authentic.
Using the video verification tool InVID-WeVerify, we traced the original footage in the video from the deleted post to Tesla’s YouTube channel.
Reverse image searches confirmed the original footage comes from the company’s annual shareholder meeting held on May 16, 2023 (archived here) where Musk talked about developments in electric cars.
AFP Fact Check matched several keyframes from the manipulated clip to the original footage.
For example, a wide shot of Musk on stage appears in both the altered video (at 2’01”) and 35 minutes into the original version.
Furthermore, at this point in the manipulated video, the audio mimics Musk’s voice and says, “you can see that it was designed with these two basic requirements in mind, that means you can start earning 1,250 rands every hour”.
There is a noticeable disparity between his lip movements and his speech in the altered version.
At the same point in the original footage, Musk talks about Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Beta — not about any investment software.
At no point in the meeting did he discuss any such software.
On November 7, 2023, Herd also dismissed the videos.
“Another indecent abuse of AI. Please note each and every video involving SABC visuals and Elon Musk (which seem to be popping up everywhere) are FAKE,” Herd commented on X (archived here).
A reverse image search of keyframes from the second video that purportedly “shocked” the South African government reveals that the footage of Musk was taken from an online interview he gave in the United States at the All-In Summit on September 13, 2023.
During the interview (archived here), Musk talked about an array of topics, among them geopolitics, artificial intelligence, and the “creators’ economy”. At no stage does he tout a new investment software.
The edited video was also flagged as being generated by AI by the European verification project veraai.eu, in which AFP is a partner. This detector identifies specific traces left by AI image-generation software.
Lastly, the clip featuring former BBC presenter Joanna Gosling was a manipulation of Musk’s interview hosted by the American-Canadian non-profit media organisation TED in 2022.
During the conversation with TED head Chris Anderson, Musk spoke (archived here) about Twitter, Tesla and how his brain works.
Again, he makes no mention of releasing a “new secret investment” to the public.
Additionally, we found the original footage of Gosling which aired on January 23, 2023, when she was bidding farewell to the BBC after 23 years (archived here).
AFP Fact Check shared the videos with Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who is an expert in digital forensics, misinformation and image analysis.
“The videos were made using two basic technologies: voice cloning and lip-sync video deepfake,” he said. “The voices were generated using AI-powered voice cloning in which a person’s voice can be cloned from one to two minutes of authentic audio.”
He explained that the second video featuring Herd was a lip-sync deepfake “created by modifying the mouth region in an otherwise original video to be consistent with the new fake audio”.
Vukosi Marivate, a computer science professor at the University of Pretoria, told AFP Fact Check that the posts “caused a stir with a few of my acquaintances asking me if I had seen them and what my thoughts were on the scheme by Musk. Obviously the video is fake so I had to tell them it is disinformation.”
“People should be suspect of content that is promising high returns or very emotive,” he added.
This is not the first-time manipulated videos of Musk have been used to advertise purported investment schemes. In June this year similar fake testimonials circulated in Canada and were debunked by AFP Fact Check here.
