It's a deepfake scam.

In recent days, a fraudulent video has begun circulating (com. deepfake) where you can see Lionel Messi promoting an app called “wild diving”: The footballer “says” it is one of his main sources of income and claims to have helped thousands of people make money.

This content, which is circulating on Instagram, uses parts of a real interview that the footballer gave a few months ago to the Argentine broadcast program “Olga”.

In the edited video, the voices of both the interviewer and the football player have been changed Artificially modified To make viewers believe they are witnessing a real app promotion.

In addition, scammers use two additional strategies to reinforce this misconception: The football player mentions another strategy Sources of income Such as advertising contracts with well-known brands, and this is true.

In addition, they appear Advertising videos While the football player is speaking, to prevent the user from noticing the differences between the voice and lip movement of the people involved and thus detecting the scam.

According to ESET's cybersecurity team, which studied the case, the app is only available for the Apple Store. while The chances of getting any kind of “award” are almost non-existent The chances of recovering any investment made in Wildcat Dive are very low.

The results of their analysis confirm complaints in reviews of the app in Apple's App Store, where affected users reported the impossibility of getting their money back and condemned the app as fraudulent.

Although the current version of the application It does not work Once downloaded and the description and pictures shown in the store do not provide more information, the reviews mention some interesting features. According to them, the game has betting functions that allow users to invest money and get profits from it.

However, the application has more interesting reviews: they come from suspicious users, with errors in writing and punctuation. This may indicate that some of them were written unfairly.

Those reviews that provide a lower score indicate that the application is fraudulent and does not allow withdrawal of invested funds.

Program called HeyGen A video of Lionel Messi has gone viral “Speaking in English: This is deepfake material, that is, material edited by artificial intelligence that takes your voice and syncs it perfectly with the lips of the national team's number 10.

It is known in the football environment that since Messi lived most of his life in Argentina and Spain, he did not need to learn new languages. This was demonstrated during his stay in France over the past two years, as he is currently doing in the United States.

Social networks began showing a video of Liu giving his first conference at Inter Miami, surprisingly speaking in English, a fact that took many users by surprise before they realized it was work carried out by artificial intelligence.