The actor Ioan Gruffudd has warned fans about "explicit and disturbing" AI-generated content being used to impersonate him online, and has urged people not to send money to anyone using his likeness.
How he found out is the part that stays with you. "A woman came to a convention I was recently attending and she was under the impression that she was in an extramarital relationship with me for over a year," he said in an Instagram post.
"She showed me hundreds of AI images and videos that someone claiming to be me had sent to her. The images were explicit and disturbing."
How the approach worked
The woman was targeted through a Facebook page dedicated to the crime drama Elsbeth, in which Gruffudd played a musician named Angus. The 53-year-old actor, from near Aberdare in Rhondda Cynon Taf, rose to fame in the long-running Hornblower series.
The person behind that page sent her "a cell number, and asked her to communicate via Telegram", he said. "They began sending AI images and videos to 'prove' that it was me."
The word doing the work is "prove"
This site has covered AI-generated scams several times — fake missing-pet photographs used to extract gift cards, fabricated cremation images in Uttar Pradesh, a doctored beach scene in Cox's Bazar. Those cases all used generated media to start a deception.
This one is different, and more worrying. The images were not the hook. They were produced on demand to answer doubt, over a year, each time the victim needed reassurance that the person she was speaking to was real.
That is a change in what the technology does to a fraud. The old advice — ask for a photo, ask for a video, ask them to hold up a newspaper — assumed that supplying fresh proof was expensive. It is no longer expensive. Any verification test that can be satisfied by an image can now be satisfied by a generated one.
What he actually asked people to do
Gruffudd's instructions are narrow and worth repeating exactly, because they are the kind of rule that survives the technology changing.
If anyone believes they are speaking to him through social media pages that are not his official channels, "this is not me". And: "I will never give out my cell number to anyone that I don't personally know."
Both of those are rules about channel, not about content. They do not ask you to judge whether an image is genuine, which is the judgement that no longer works. They ask where the conversation is happening and how it moved there.
Why this matters here
The pattern — a fan page, a phone number, a shift to a private messaging app, then escalating requests for money — is exactly the shape of romance fraud reported across Bangladesh, usually running through Facebook pages and WhatsApp or Telegram.
The useful signal is not the picture. It is the move off the platform. A real approach does not need to leave for an app with no moderation and no record.
