A deepfake video of Nvidia’s CEO sent thousands of viewers to a crypto scam
Nvidia’s GPU technology conference isn’t making many waves with gamers or PC hardware enthusiasts this year, perhaps because it seems exclusively interested in improving hardware for “AI” and data centers. So it’s almost ironic that a fake version of the main livestream relied on generative “AI” to simulate CEO Jensen Huang and send viewers into a cryptocurrency scam.
A YouTube channel called “NVIDIA LIVE” launched a live stream shortly after the start of the real Nvidia event, which Twitter users claimed was a deepfake video of the CEO promoting a “mass cryptocurrency adoption event.” A QR code was displayed on screen and sent viewers to a site that allegedly turned their cryptocurrency for profit (instead of just stealing it, which was almost certainly what was actually happening).
Tom’s Hardware quotes the fake Huang: “We’re postponing the keynote for a moment to announce something truly special, a mass crypto adoption event that ties directly to Nvidia’s mission to accelerate human progress.” A speech-to-text transcript of the fake video continues with cryptobro buzzwords before claiming that any supported cryptocurrency sent to the linked wallet would be converted to Bitcoin and returned. This would mean Nvidia giving away billions of dollars to anonymous people, seemingly for no reason other than “human progress.” So yeah, even if you couldn’t see through the deepfake video or voice, you’d need a few GDDR modules short of an RTX 5090 to crack.
Reportedly, the fake stream attracted nearly 100,000 viewers at one point, more than eight times that of Nvidia’s real live stream, thanks to its higher presence in YouTube search results for at least part of the time while the real keynote was taking place. It is unclear how many people were deceived. Of course, the video is long gone, although the small-scale YouTube user who allegedly hosted it is still visible.
In the opening speech, the real Huang announced a billion-dollar investment in former phone giant Nokia and talked about humanoid robots. GTC moved from its usual home in San Jose to Washington, D.C., apparently in hopes of a little one-off lobbying of the Trump administration. There is something amusing about the image of an Nvidia CEO being used to fool people in a crypto scam, since Nvidia chips were the hardware that powered the crypto bubble, and are indeed now being used in much the same way for generative “AI”.
