“I fell in love with a ‘deepfake’ from a dating site who scammed me”

Love can be deceitful. Even our face-to-face romances can have hidden, painful aspects.

But when you lead a relationship solely through the illusionary world of advanced technology, your innermost feelings can be even more exposed to crushing disappointment.

This is what happened to Yzabel Dzisky, a French filmmaker who was seduced by the world of online dating and ended up falling into a mirage of deepfakethe artificial technology that allows you to create very realistic videos of people who do not exist.

Dzisky tells the BBC how she fell in love with an impersonated man, how it devastated her and how she kept going to find a truth that could heal her broken heart.

“Tony”

In 2017, Dzisky was 46, single, and looking to make a documentary about dating apps.

The plan was to interview random people and look for potential collaborators. But this documentary idea also seemed like an opportunity to find love for herself.

“My single friends would tell me all these funny love stories and their dates on those apps. First I planned to go in and interview people. But I thought if people manage to find love there, maybe I could too,” she says.

He found the profile of an attractive man. He was “Tony”, or at least that was his name at first, a surgeon from Los Angeles, California, who planned to move to France soon.

Dzisky took the first step, a “like”. The attraction was mutual: it was a “match”.

They talked for more than a week and Dzisky was shocked by the coincidences.

“He was talking about his life and I was telling him about mine. Interestingly, the names of our dogs and the names of our daughters turned out to be very similar,” she recalls.

“Women like coincidences and I found it very romantic. So I got carried away with this love story.”

So he wanted to see him on a video call.

“murat”

On a night out with his friends, Dzisky called “Tony” on his mobile phone and during that 10-minute video call he showed his face to his friends.

It was a head that barely moved framed in the small screen of a mobile phone.

“When you’re on a video call, most of the time you tend to look at yourself and come out cool instead of focusing on the person on the call, so I didn’t really pay much attention to detail,” explains Dzisky.

They kept in touch with messages and short video calls until “Tony” suddenly stopped responding, giving no reason.

When he finally answered, he said that it was not “Tony”, but that his real name was “Murat”.

“I was surprised, yet another coincidence, because my ex-husband’s name is also Murat. He said that he was Turkish and that he lived in Istanbul,” Dzisky recounts.

“I wasn’t even mad, just surprised,” she recalls.

“When I asked him why he changed his name, he said it was because he has an (Arab) origin in the Middle East and he thought that would make me wonder. But I told him that I have no problem because of the origins of my ex-husband, who is also Arab-French-Turkish. So I said it was a big coincidence and it didn’t bother me.”

Dzisky decided to Google what there was about him.

“There were a lot of things. I could see the photos, the videos in Turkish. It was everywhere, even on television. I had no doubts about him: he was real and a well-known surgeon.”

“I don’t know why I did that”

Everything seemed to be going well for her. The occasional short video calls and intense declarations of love from her were enough, as well as the promise that he would “come see her soon”.

But first, “Murat” said, he had to visit the Chinese city of Shanghai. It was this trip that set off the first alarm bells.

“He called me saying he was in Shanghai to buy medical equipment. She said her credit card didn’t work and he asked me for help. She wanted me to send her 3,000 euros”, she explains.

After that, “Murat” said he would fly to Paris to finally meet Dzisky in person.

She was surprised that a well-known surgeon had to borrow money and talked to a friend about it.

He had become suspicious, but still decided to send 200 euros via international money transfer.

“I don’t know why I did that. I thought maybe the credit cards issued in Turkey had problems there. He thanked me and showed me his plane ticket from Shanghai to Paris. I was going to be here in three days,” explains Dzisky.

When the day came, she was excited to meet him in person for the first time.

“So I went to the airport to meet him. I waited and waited… But he never showed up.”

Dzisky pauses and takes a deep breath as he talks about that day at the airport.

“I tried to contact him again, he was not responding. Then there were days of silence. I got very angry, why didn’t she answer her? But still I was nice to him, I wanted him to answer me. I needed answers.”

The possibility of scams and online scams began to cross his mind, but he had a hard time accepting it.

“It is impossible, I have seen it on video calls, it was real. My friends have seen it, my children have seen it. I thought I had a problem with my brain. This couldn’t be happening,” she repeated to herself.

deepfake

A few days later, “Murat” contacted her again, but this time Dzisky wanted to see it on a bigger screen, so he opened the chat on his computer.

“The quality was poor; I thought maybe your connection wasn’t good. There was also a delay in the image. I heard ‘click, click, click’ when he was talking to me. I walked over to the screen, looked closely, watching closely the video was freezing a little bit.”

Dzisky needed an expert and a video editor friend helped her. She was told to watch a “deepfake” video with Barack Obama on YouTube.

He found many similarities between what he had seen on his calls and these fake videos online. She finally accepted that she had been deceived: the video and audio of her had obviously been manipulated.

“I felt ashamed, foolish, naive. I am a woman with a rock and roll spirit, I never let myself down. But with this I felt robbed, they had stripped me of my feelings and violated my soul, my spirit. We had been writing some beautiful things to each other, I believed in him. I showed my children.”

Her anger led her to confront the person behind the screen, but there was silence again.

Dzisky kept writing and even offered to give more money to get him back on his chats. When he finally got another video call, he heard the same clicks in the conversation.

It was time…

“David”

Dzisky confronted him. He told her that he knew he was not “Murat”, to tell him who he was.

“He was silent for a moment and then asked me why I was doing this. Then she hung up.”

Surprisingly, he responded by saying that his name was David and that he was a 20-year-old hacker from Nigeria.

“I asked him why he did these things. Why she fell in love with me and asked me for money. She said that they had already taken a lot of money from people with scams, that they had a very large network around the world. We even had a video call. I saw it with a friend. He said that he had gotten rich with these fake accounts, that he wanted to be a soccer player and study in Canada.”

The identity of “Murat”, added David, had been invented at random, with no idea of ​​the appeal that fiction would have for Dzisky due to coincidences.

Murat, the royal

She was devastated, but she couldn’t let go of the love she felt for “Murat”. Seeking how to close this chapter, she set out to find the real man whose identity had been stolen. She found a phone number on one of her social media accounts and called him.

At first, the Turkish surgeon ignored Dzisky’s messages. He was aware of the numerous fake accounts opened in his name, but he didn’t want to deal with scams.

“I decided to send a video message. I said, ‘I’m real, I think you’ve been hacked, I mean no harm, we have a lot in common. I would like to meet you and give you all the evidence I have.

Dzisky told Murat that she planned to visit Istanbul, and he agreed to meet her. She immediately booked a plane ticket to Turkey.

“The Bosphorus River was beautiful, magnificent. But I felt very alone…”, she remembers.

The surgeon, it seemed, was hesitating to meet this stranger.

“So I went to the hospital. It was very difficult for me, for months, I thought I had been talking to him. When he opened the door, his secretary said that he was waiting for me. For the first time, he was real”.

Dzisky pauses at the memory of her first meeting with him. He has tears running down his face and his voice trembles.

“He didn’t know I had feelings for him, but he was very receptive. I tried not to make a drama. I tried not to show my feelings, but my heart was… I was telling myself that it wasn’t real, that it wasn’t him,” he recalls.

“Then I showed him the papers, the screenshots of the conversations I had with the hacker so he could share them with the police. Her face began to change. And he said he didn’t want to keep his patients waiting, so we agreed to meet later for dinner.”

Dzisky said they had a beautiful evening talking about what had happened. He had decided to make a feature film about his story and had contacted some producers and actors in Turkey.

He would visit Istanbul and see the surgeon a few more times.

“We kept in touch for a while, but that’s finally over. It was beautiful, but he was very burdened by fake accounts and scam stories. He had had enough.”

The BBC contacted the surgeon and his lawyer in Turkey. They declined to comment on this particular case, but said they are trying to warn people about the fake accounts created in the surgeon’s name.

It was not the first time someone with a similar experience had approached the surgeon.

Criminal complaints have also been filed, but prosecuting this type of cybercrime in Turkey is complicated due to a lack of evidence. It is difficult to trace the origin of fake accounts, since most originate from abroad.

Dzisky was heartbroken, she wanted closure on this stage of her life and is hopeful that her film can do this for her.

But he does have a message for anyone who is duped by deepfakes or online scams.

“We have to fight back. We need to chase these ghost lovers. I think we don’t talk about it enough because we’re embarrassed,” she says.

Despite the shame of losing money to these scams, he encourages people to share their experiences with family and friends.

“We have to take possession of reality. We are in these apps because we want to be loved and we want to love. They are like drugs, you want more and more. You lose yourself in this virtual affection.

“Those platforms are good for meeting new people, but you have to meet them in person very quickly. The real connection must not be lost, because if it is lost, then you start to feel very alone.”

Murat is not the real name of the surgeon; his identity has been protected at his request.

What is catfishing and how to avoid it?

Online cheating, known as catfishing, is when someone sets up a fake online profile to trick people looking for love, usually for money.

Police in the UK warn against scammers, saying they generally go to great lengths to gain trust and convince their targets they are in a genuine relationship.

Thedeepfake is a term used generically to refer to any video in which faces have been digitally swapped or altered with the help of artificial intelligence (AI).

There are many different apps and filters available to swap faces in images and videos in a very realistic way, but not all of them use AI.

The term comes from deep learning, a branch of AI that uses “neutral networks”, a type of machine learning technique that bears some resemblance to the functioning of the human brain.

Sources: BBC, Age UK, UK Police