Fraud and deepfakes · 21 September 2026
A photo just landed on WhatsApp. Is it real, or did AI make it?
You do not need to be an expert. The trick is no longer the ear. It is not forwarding until you check.
Alejandro Carmona · Nopubly · 21 September 2026
The scene never changes. Someone drops a face into the family chat. A politician who never said that. A son who is not on that beach. A doctor “recommending” a treatment. Three people forward it. Your thumb sits on the arrow.
That — not someone else’s summit story — is the AI problem that actually reaches you. Nopubly will not beat El País on geopolitics. We will cover this: a picture on your phone, and you cannot tell if that person exists.
Why “look at the hands” no longer works
Two years ago a deepfake gave itself away: six fingers, mushy text on a sign, earrings melting into hair. Current models ship with ears, teeth and office backgrounds that survive a glance. “It looks off” still helps when the photo asks for money. It is not proof. Neither is a screenshot. WhatsApp compresses and recrops. Treating that thumbnail as evidence is the point of the scam.
Three cheap questions before any app
- Who sent it? A stranger, a new number, a cousin who never talks politics: drop your guard.
- What does it want you to do? Forward, pay, call, install, “don’t tell anyone.” Then the face is irrelevant. The hook is urgency.
- Can you check it in 30 seconds? If it is not in a newsroom you recognise, do not pass it on. The group can wait.
When it is worth scanning
If it is a face and you still doubt, upload it to the Nopubly scanner. Built for photographs and faces, not for decorating a headline. You get a verdict — real, AI or uncertain — and a score. Free. No account.
Limits, plainly: memes, drawings and magazine landscapes can fool it. It is not a court expert. It is a second opinion when the eye is not enough. To train the eye without risking the group, the daily Real-or-AI challenge uses faces that do not exist.
What not to do
Do not crop “to make it clearer” and resend: you wreck the trace. Do not install a miracle detector that wants phone permissions — that is often the virus a technician later has to clean. If the device is already acting up, skip the photo and buy minutes in the panel. A person connects remotely, on phone, tablet or computer, without you leaving home.
Nopubly’s front page still links out to the papers that reported today’s news. This piece is not a clipping of those headlines. It is ours: what to do with a dubious image. If one just arrived, start with the scanner.