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After a year of silence on Instagram, Florent Pagny published a video on the social network on Monday, August 12, to give an update and, above all, to warn his fans against online scams using his voice to extort money.
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– Florent Pagny breaks his silence to denounce the scams usurping his identity on social networks.
Florent Pagny breaks the silence. “It’s been almost a year since I posted anything on Instagram. I don’t like social media. So I give them credit for the convenience, but I especially give them credit for the toxic side.”said the singer suffering from a lung cancer in a video published on Monday, August 12 on his Instagram account. The 62-year-old artist decided to speak out to give reassuring news about his state of health and especially to alert his fans about the spread of online scams usurping his identityas reported TF1.
Using artificial intelligence, cybercriminals are imitating the voice and image of Florent Pagny in order to extort money from their victims. A fan “who for some time believed he had a direct and private relationship with me” was thus trapped and “was scammed out of a few hundred euros”Florent Pagny tells Instagram. Faced with this scam, the victim’s daughter decided to contact the singer to warn him and share the video sent by the scammer.
Also read: Identity theft: principle and sanctions
“They are garbage”
In these images, we see and hear the singer addressing the woman in question to try to reassure her. “This is my voice, this is me speaking, but I never made this message”denounces Florent Pagny. “This is the film I made in 2022 to announce my problem and cancel the end of my tour, but with artificial intelligence they are able to do that”he explains. “They are garbage”the singer lashes out. “It happens a lot on Facebookwhere the scammers go to find their victims”he specifies.
According to the artist, “We won’t be able to stop these people, they are too vicious and too sophisticated with this computer science”. “The only thing we can do is this kind of film”he says. Florent Pagny invites his fans not to be “naive”. “You can’t imagine for a second that an artist or a public figure can give you a number or contact information through social networks. If you haven’t met him, this can’t happen»he warns. Recently, Élise Lucet and Nikos Aliagas had also denounced this type of scam on social networks.
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