A doctored video of Union Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman promoting an investment platform for Indians has surfaced online.
BOOM found the video features visuals of Sitharaman from the 55th GST Council Meet press conference held on December 21, 2024 and has been overlaid with AI-generated audio.
The video shows Sitharaman urging Indians to invest in a quick-money making platform where a single investment of Rs 21,000 can generate more than half a million rupees in a month.
The video was shared by a Facebook page along with a link with further details.
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Fact Check
We clicked on the link provided with the viral post which took us to a website impersonating The Times Of India containing an article about the investment project. Though the page contained TOI's masthead, it had a dubious url - https://southernbellekennel.com/ - which didn't match that of TOI's official URL - https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/. This indicated that the webpage was impersonating TOI's news website, and was not a real news article by the publication.
The fake article also included a video of India Today journalist Chetna Vasudevan talking about the investment project that was introduced by Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy. Narayana Murthy can be heard talking about the quick money-making platform using artificial intelligence. Furthermore, the article also mentioned a platform called Quantum AI which helps people earn in millions.
BOOM had previously debunked deepfake videos of Narayana Murthy where he can be seen promoting Quantum AI investment platform. Moreover, we were also unable to find any article about such an investment platform in The Times Of India or India Today or other credible news sources.
We ran a keyword search on Google related to Sitharaman promoting any investment platform but was unable to find any credible reports supporting the viral claim.
We, then, performed a reverse image search on the keyframes of the video using Google Lens which led us to a report published by ZeeBusiness which included the same visual. As per the report published on December 21, 2024, Sitharaman's image was from 55th GST Council meeting.
Taking a cue, we ran a keyword search on YouTube and found multiple live streams of the GST Council press conference from December 21, 2024.
In the six and a half hour long press conference streamed by NDTV Profit, we noted similar visuals as that of the viral video from 5:54:18 hours onwards. But, there was no mention of any investment platform unlike the viral claim. Click here to see.
A comparison of the screengrabs of the viral video to that of the NDTV Profit video can be seen below.
We noticed Sitharaman's lip movements were not in sync with that of the audio. Taking a cue BOOM sent the viral video to our partners at Deepfakes Analysis Unit (DAU) for detailed verification.
The experts at DAU found many jump-cuts in the video as it alternates between different shots along with visible inconsistencies around Sitharaman's mouth area. Moreover, they noticed the voice is robotic without natural pauses that are characteristic to human speech. The accent does not match Sitharaman's natural one either. DAU also tested the audio on Hiya AI and the result showed a high percentage of manipulation using artificial intelligence.
