Nigerian police say a 23-year-old used AI voice cloning and deepfakes to pose as Elon Musk in a crypto 'trading hub' scam; nine arrested with help from UK, Canadian and German police
The Nigeria Police Force's National Cybercrime Centre said on Friday Oct 23 in Abuja that it had arrested nine suspects in three operations, per Blueprint (Oct 24). In one, three men were arrested in Lekki, Lagos, on Oct 14 for identity theft, investment fraud and money laundering; the centre alleges that one of them, Adebayo Adewale Basit, 23, 'used artificial intelligence voice cloning and deepfake technology' to impersonate Tesla chief executive Elon Musk across Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, X and other platforms to lure victims into a 'Bitcoin Trading Hub' investment scheme. The other two operations, in Delta State, concerned online fraud and a romance-fraud and money-laundering ring whose two documented Canadian victims lost more than CA$417,000 between them. Wallet analysis across the cases traced 21 approved transactions totalling $21,150 and 1,684,441 USDT said to have been laundered through a Binance wallet; $15,900 in cryptocurrency was recovered to a custodial wallet. The UK's NCA, the RCMP and Germany's BKA assisted. The police did not put a loss figure on the Musk impersonation itself; the suspects have not been tried.
Damage
Investment-fraud losses to victims abroad, amount for the AI-voiced Musk scheme not stated; $15,900 recovered across the nine arrests
Sources
Blueprint (Nigeria), second source. Evidence confidence: medium. Dated to the Lekki arrest (Oct 14); disclosed at the police briefing on Friday Oct 23 (Blueprint published Oct 24, 22:28 WAT). The AI claim is the police's allegation as reported; Blueprint quotes no one directly and its picture caption belongs to a different story, so confidence is medium. The CA$417,000 and $21,150 figures belong to the Delta State cases, not to the Musk impersonation. Novelty 1: Musk deepfake crypto scams are a long-running pattern; the arrest with three foreign police forces is what is new.
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