Dutch lawmakers who believed they were speaking to an employee of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny via Zoom this week were cheated. The House of Representatives confirmed after reports from De Volkskrant that the man they spoke to on Wednesday was an extremely fake imitation of the chief of staff of Russian opposition leader Leonid Volkov.
The Parliamentary Permanent Committee for Foreign Affairs is furious about the fraud. The members now still want a chat with the real Volkov. It is not clear who was behind the scam, but experts say in the newspaper that it took a long time, “possibly by government agencies.”
Deepfake technology replaces one side of a video with another. This way, you can get someone to say anything they didn’t say at all.
De Volkskrant also writes that the fake Volkov has recently had more conversations in Estonia, Lithuania, and the United Kingdom, among others. British Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Tom Tugendhat takes into account that it is Russian President Putin who is behind the fake Volkov movie. “Putin’s Kremlin is so afraid of Navalny that they are now organizing mock meetings to discredit Navalny’s team.”
