Affinity fraud: Deepfakes in the diaspora
The “law student” who contacted me online and later joined a Zoom call seemed credible. He said he’d found my email through the Armenian Bar Association, spoke with a light accent and referenced community life. His posture felt stiff, but I chalked it up to nerves. Only after a series of urgent messages did the truth surface: he wasn’t a person at all, but a synthetic construct stitched from fragments of data, voice and likeness — a deepfake engineered to exploit cultural familiarity, name-based trust and ultimately, steal my money.
Research on diaspora communities shows a clear pattern: when a message appears to come from “one of our own,” skepticism drops.
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It’s important to spread this awareness, but as a genealogist, I understand but strongly opposed your urging to remove all genealogical information from the web. That’s like burning our libraries and opportunity to keep track of our history. A scammer can already find your relatives’ names from public records database, newspaper archives, and much more. Also websites like Ancestry allow anyone to upload family trees, so most likely you appear in multiple other trees already that you can’t take down. Your other helpful suggestions such taking it slow and always verifying identity is enough without trying to bring the burgeoning field of Armenian genealogical study to a halt.