A video showing Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman talking about making investments and guaranteeing returns if one signs up with a specific platform is being shared on social media.
How do we know?: We noticed that in the video, Sitharam appeared to mispronounce the words 'paise', 'rupees', and 'lakh'.
We then carried out a reverse image search on the video, which led us to Business Today's YouTube channel.
It had shared a video which showed Sitharaman in the same outfit, holding a microphone with 'BT' on it, on 27 July 2024.
In this video, she discussed how people belonging to the middle economic class should avoid trading with futures and options because of their risky nature.
Additionally, she touched upon people complaining about taxation.
There was no mention of her vouching for a certain investment platform or talking about guaranteed returns.
Is it AI?: Since there was no evidence that she made such a statement, and her speech patterns in the claim were monotonous with mispronounced words, we ran the video through Hive Moderation's artificial intelligence detection tool.
It showed a 99.9 percent certainty that the video was "likely to contain deepfake or AI generated content," with the audio element getting a 99 percent score.
Sitharaman on deepfakes: The Union finance minister has often been the subject of deepfakes, often shared to falsely claim that she endorsed various investment platforms.
The Quint has debunked several such claims in our fact-checks, some of which can be seen here, here, and here.
Addressing the circulation of these videos, she said that fraud was "no longer about breaching firewalls," and criminals were now using "AI to mimic voices, clone identities, and create lifelike videos that can manipulate people."
She announced the Security and Exchanges Board of India (SEBI) and National Payments Corporation of India's (NPCI) joint initiative to show validated UPI handles forSEBI-registered investor-facing intermediaries, with suffixes such as '.brk' for brokers and '.mf' for mutual funds.
Sitharaman also told people about SEBI's “SEBI Check”, which allows investors to verify UPI IDs and bank account details of registered intermediaries using their website or the Saarthi app.
Conclusion: A deepfake of Nirmala Sitharaman is being shared to falsely claim that she promoted an investment app and guaranteed returns on investments.
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