He introduced himself as Baoer Kechatie, a Russian soldier embedded in the Chechen special forces fighting in Ukraine. "Now we are fighting to the death against the Ukrainian army," he said in Mandarin, gun in hand, in one of the clips he uploaded to his Douyin account, China's version of TikTok. He had 400,000 followers and had been posting videos allegedly recorded from the front line for nine months.

In one of them, climbed a hill and with an industrial landscape in the background, he says that he is in front of a nuclear plant that the Russian army has just taken. In another video, hidden in bushes, Kechatie says he has fought the U.S. Marines. It was even recorded in front of a white limousine claiming that it was one of the official vehicles of President Volodimir Zelenski, which his brigade had seized.

Despite the implausibility of his testimony, easily dismantled, his account did not stop attracting more followers who applauded his "bravery". As a final touch, in the last two months, with the increase in his popularity on the social network, the soldier tiktoker linked in each video a link that led to an e-commerce store where he sold Russian products, from vodka to milk.

In the end, everything he told was so crude that his own followers ended up uncovering the scam: Baoer Kechatie was the pseudonym used by aChinese from the central province of Henan who had made a new face – that of a bald man with a leafy beard – with deepfake software: a system that, Powered by artificial intelligence, it can reproduce or clone, starting from real images and videos, a person's face and voice.

Douyin users, pulling the IP address of the account, discovered that it was located in Henan and not in Ukraine. The scenarios in which he set his montages were recorded in China. Everything was a scam to sell products imported from Russia – he had sold at least 210 items – posing as a soldier who fought alongside the Kremlin troops, who fall sympathetic to the most nationalist current that moves through Chinese social networks and devours all the propaganda of Moscow. The guns Kechatie showed in his videos were toy.

Sixth Tone, one of the Chinese newspapers that has bounced the story, says that Douyin suspended the account of the fake soldier over the weekend, who had already changed his name on the app and began deleting the videos before the scrutiny of followers who uncovered his true location.

This is just the latest of the many scams using deepfake that are jumping in the Asian giant. There have been several reports of victims receiving a video call from a person who had cloned the face and voice of a family member to ask for money. In the e-commerce industry there has been controversy with live broadcasts because some users, to sell more products, use this type of technology to clone the faces of famous streamers, especially Douyin.

A month ago, a content creator on another app cloned the voice of a famous Singaporean pop singer, Stefanie Sun, and uploaded videos, pretending to be Sun, in which she covered hit songs by other artists. The videos racked up millions of views, but many questioned whether or not they infringed on the artists' copyrights.

Earlier this year, China's top internet watchdog released new regulation to control what it called "deep synthesis technologies," a reference to AI used to generate text, images and videos.

The regulation now requires related platforms to set up a real-name verification system for users before they can access the service. Meanwhile, content providers must obtain separate consent from users if their service includes features that edit their biometric information, such as their face and voice, and are prohibited from spreading false information.

This law came to light shortly after ChatGPT, the chatbot based on generative AI created by the US firm OpenAI, took off earlier this year. Although it is censored in China, like so many other apps in the West, it is easy to download it using a virtual private network, a fairly common software that can help circumvent the restrictions of the Great Firewall.


According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Learn more