By Hazel Gandhi
A video showing News18 Hindi's anchor Amish Devgan reporting on the benefits of a casino gaming app called 11Winner is viral online as real.
BOOM found that the claims are false, the video is a deepfake and Devgan never promoted the use of such an app.
The video shows a news bulletin where Devgan first talks about the app, followed by the story of a man who earned a lot of money using it. The video claims that the man, a Vinod Shinde, managed to buy a sports car and a two-storey house from his winnings on the app and turned his life around. A graphic on the video reads, "300,000,000 INR is the jackpot won by a Mumbai native using a mobile app"
(Original text in Hindi: "300,000,000 INR एक मोबाइल ऐप का उपयोग करके मुंबई नविासी द्वारा जीता गया जैकपॉट है")
The video is being shared on Facebook without any caption.
Click here to view the post and here for an archive.
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FACT CHECK
BOOM found that the video is a deepfake and has been created using generative-AI; Devgan has never reported on the benefits of this casino gaming app.
We ran a keyword search on Google for any news reports by Amish Devgan on this app, and could not find any results.
We then noticed that Devgan's lip movements in the video were unusual, leading us to believe that it was made using a voice cloning and deepfake tool.
Taking a clue from this, we ran the audio of the video through an AI voice detector called Loccus AI which generated a score of 61% for Devgan's voice. According to this tool, any score below 70% is considered to be a voice likely generated using AI.
The tool also indicated that the voice of the narrator playing after Devgan was most likely a real voice.
BOOM was unable to find the original video of Devgan from which this promotion video for 11Winner was created, but it is likely that it was made using generative-AI and is not real.
BOOM has previously debunked several such get-rich-quick fraud schemes being peddled on Facebook. The videos clone the voices of celebrities like Mukesh Ambani, Alia Bhatt, Katrina Kaif, and Sadhguru to make the deepfake videos and promote a dubious investment scheme. Two such videos of Ratan Tata were also being promoted by Facebook as ads on their platform. Another set of videos we debunked included fake videos of Hindi news anchors including Ravish Kumar, Anjana Om Kashyap, Arnab Goswami, and Sudhir Chaudhary promoting a diabetes medicine.
