A woman from Box County, Pennsylvania, has arrested and charged with making deepfakes of her daughter’s cheerleading rivals in a compromising position.
Raddaela Spoon, 50, created the images to force the girls out of the competition so that her daughter, a high school cheerleader who competed against other high school teams and her team could take home the prize. Spawn charged last week with child molestation and related criminal misconduct, but was later released under the provision that he return to the March 30 hearing, the Philadelphia Inquirer reports, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer report.
After the three young women got drunk, evaporated and even made nude images, Spoon believed to have given the doctored images a message encouraging the girls to kill them. The case is not just a disturbing example of taking to the finals; it is mainstream events be used as a deepfakes for blackmail, highlighting the dangers of a technology that can make anyone look undeniably guilty. Last summer when the parents of one of the victims of the investigation contacted police for an anonymous number of people harassing their daughter.
Their daughter is a member of the Voltaire Vipers, a competitive all-star cheerleading squad from Doylestown, and feared the pictures would remove her from the team. “The suspect took a real photo to make this teenage girl look like she wasn’t dressed naked and edited it through some photoshopping apps. The reality was a bathing suit,” Box County DA Matt Weintraub told 6abc in a statement. However, they quickly learned that he was not alone – two more girls came up with similar stories.
One of the victims, Madi Hime (17), was in the Victory Vipers at the time and had previously argued with Spoon’s daughter. He claimed that after following the argument, he received repeated hate messages, among which the Honors told him to kill her, 6abc reported. The police department tracked messages from an IP in Spoon’s home, which prompted detectives to search his phone. Enough evidence found to link Spawn to the number of victims and he arrested.
Spawn and his attorneys strongly denied the allegations, saying the district attorney did not provide any evidence. Whether the allegations are true or not, the landscape is changing with cyber-bullying. Deepfake technologies are incredibly realistic and accessible to more than just high-level software enthusiasts; many are concerned about the possibility of online users deceived by Doctor Media, not just fame and fortune, affecting political events such as elections.
Technologists continue to fight – AI has now deployed to differentiate between DIFEX and Real Deal, it remains to seen whether deepfakes will remain a problem or whether our computer identifiers will be outsmarted.
