On Jan. 16, CTV News Ottawa aired a story about a retired Ottawa couple who were scammed into using their line of credit to purchase cryptocurrency through a ‘financial advisor’. Two weeks later, a fraudulent rendition of that story, made with deepfake AI, surfaced on Facebook.

Scammers had taken the original cautionary tale and, in a deeply ironic twist, used it in an attempt to dupe more people into falling for investment scams similar to the one that had tricked Doug and Victoria Lloyd.