Karnataka man held for allegedly circulating deepfake nude photos of love interest and her friends

Belagavi: A 22-year-old jilted lover is now behind the bars after he allegedly used AI-generated deepfake software to morph nude pictures of his love interest and her female friends and circulated on social media to avenge them after they rejected his advances. Belagavi police in a swift action cracked the case in less than 24 hours and arrested the accused.

The accused, identified as Manthan Patil, manipulated the girl, he was in attracted to and her two other friends photos by using a deepfake app, morphing it with nude images, after she declined his proposal. He further threatened his girlfriend with these edited photos, however the girl remained steadfast and rejected his further advances. Dejected and rattled, accused Manthan to avenge his insult, circulated the morphed photos of the girl and friends on social media.

Bheemashankar Guled, SP of Belagavi rural speaking to Republic said that "The incident from Khanapur where the accused, 22 year old Manthan Patil was in love with a girl and she was not responding to his love. Angered by this Manthan Patil warns her that she along with her friends will have to pay dearly for this. He created a fake profile in the name of this girl on social media and uploaded morphed pictures of the girl and her friends as they had not supported him to take his love forward. The accused had morphed the pictures of the girls using a deep fake software which can edit photos and videos. He morphed their faces with nude images and uploaded the nude pictures on social media. To create pressure on the girl he loved he uploaded the nude pictures of his friends from her fake social media profile."

The victimized girls filed a police complaint at the cyber police station leading to the arrest of the accused Manthan who was employed at a private company in Bengaluru. The police in their investigation have also learnt that several stills were compiled and a video was made after which it was uploaded on social media. The use of these deep fake applications have created a ripple after actor Rashmika Mandanna's deep fake video was released.

Febin an ethical hacker speaking to Republic said that this trend of creating deep fake videos and images is worrying as even artificial intelligence is not able to identify whether it is fake or not at least in the preliminary analysis. 

The government of India has already strict guidelines in place and such applications are blocked on all platforms both mobile and desktops but new applications like these are released on a day to day basis and they are able to get through the firewall and install it. The only solution is to make sure that the social media profiles remain private and also there are multiple security layers before one can access it," added Febin an ethical hacker.