This harassment appears to be happening without the knowledge or consent of the photographed women, a vast majority of who are private citizens rather than celebrities or influencers. It only needs one, “which is really a reason why so many private individuals are attacked, because only one profile picture from Facebook is enough to do this,” said Patrini. Unlike the algorithms that make deepfake videos - including nonconsensual sexual videos - the Telegram bot doesn’t need thousands of images to work.
The rest of the images were likely shared privately, researchers say. A small number of these victims appeared to be underage. “This one’s unique because it’s not just people talking or people sharing content, it’s actually embedded in Telegram, and we have not found something similar,” said Giorgio Patrini, CEO and chief scientist at Sensity.Ībout 104,852 images of women have been posted publicly to the app, with 70% of the photos coming from social media or private sources. Sensity, a visual threat intelligence company headquartered in Amsterdam, discovered the Telegram network of 101,080 members, 70% of whom appeared to reside in Russia or Eastern Europe. The tool allows people to create a deepfake, a computer-generated image, of a victim from a single photo.
Over 680,000 women have no idea their photos were uploaded to a bot on the messaging app Telegram to produce photo-realistic simulated nude images without their knowledge or consent, according to tech researchers.