Deepfake defense: protect your brand from AI fakes

Picture a video call with your CEO. The voice matches, the face looks right and the background is familiar. The request is urgent: send a payment to a confidential vendor before the end of the day. Except your CEO was never on the call.

That's a deepfake attack, and it's one of the fastest-growing threats to businesses. AI tools that used to need specialist skills now take a few clicks, and the results fool careful people.

This guide explains what deepfakes are, how the technology works, why they're dangerous for brands, how to spot them and how to protect your business.

What are deepfakes?

A deepfake is an image, video or audio recording of a real person that's been created or altered with AI to show them saying or doing something they never did. The name combines "deep learning", the type of AI behind it, and "fake".

Making a convincing fake used to take expert skills and powerful computers. Now free apps can clone a voice from a short clip and swap a face in real time on a video call.

How deepfake technology works

Most deepfakes rely on two kinds of AI model:

• Encoder-decoder models learn the features of a face or voice from existing footage, compress them and then rebuild them onto new content, frame by frame.
• Generative adversarial networks (GANs) pit two models against each other. A generator creates fakes and a discriminator tries to catch them. Each round, the generator gets better, until the fakes are hard to tell from the real thing.

The more public footage of someone there is, the easier they are to copy. That makes executives, founders and on-camera talent easy targets.

Why deepfakes are dangerous for brands

Deepfakes take the social engineering attacks businesses already face and make them far more convincing:

• Payment fraud: attackers pose as an executive on a call or voice note and push staff to move money. In 2024, a finance worker at the engineering firm Arup paid out about $25 million after a video call with deepfakes of the company's CFO and colleagues.¹
• Fake endorsements and scams: deepfake videos of a founder or brand ambassador promote fake giveaways, investment schemes or counterfeit products to your audience.
• Account takeover: attackers use fake voices or videos to trick support teams or colleagues into resetting passwords or sharing login codes.
• Reputation damage: a fake clip of an executive saying something offensive can spread faster than any correction.

It's already common. In a Deloitte poll, 25.9% of executives said their organization had experienced one or more deepfake incidents.²

How to spot a deepfake

Deepfakes keep improving, so treat these as clues rather than proof:

• Faces and mouths: blurry or shifting teeth, lips slightly out of sync with the words, or edges that blur around the jaw and hairline.
• Eyes and lighting: unnatural blinking, reflections in the eyes or glasses that don't match the room, or skin that looks too smooth.
• Short clips and odd cuts: AI video is often made in short segments, so look for frequent cuts or scenes that end abruptly.
• Background details: text that turns into nonsense, objects that appear or disappear between frames, or traffic and crowds that don't make sense.
• Voice: flat emotion, odd pauses or a voice that doesn't react naturally to interruptions on a live call.
• The request itself: urgency, secrecy and a request for money, passwords or login codes are the biggest red flags of all.

How to protect your business from deepfakes

1. Verify requests through a second channel

Make it a rule that any request for money, passwords or account access is confirmed through a different, known channel, like calling the person back on a number you already have. A deepfake can copy a face. It can't answer a call to the real person's phone.

2. Train your team

Show employees what deepfakes look like, the signs above and the scams they're used for. Make it safe to pause and check, even when the request seems to come from the CEO.

3. Monitor for impersonators

Deepfakes often go out through fake accounts posing as your brand, executives or talent. Scan social platforms for accounts using your name, logo and leaders' faces, and report them fast. Our guide to social media impersonation covers how to find and remove them.

4. Protect your accounts from takeover

A deepfake posted from your real account is far more convincing than one posted from a fake. Use unique passwords, team-based 2FA and round-the-clock monitoring so attackers can't get in. See our account takeover prevention guide.

5. Filter phishing in comments, DMs and email

Deepfake scams still need a link or a message to reach people. Filtering phishing out of your inbox, DMs and comments stops many of them before anyone watches the video.

6. Keep evidence and have a response plan

Save screenshots, links and copies of any deepfake that targets your brand, with dates and where you found it. Platforms need this to remove content. Decide in advance who confirms a clip is fake, who reports it and how you'll tell your audience.

For the wider picture, see how to protect your business from AI impersonation.

How Spikerz helps protect your brand from deepfakes

Spikerz is a social media security platform that connects through official platform APIs, so you never share your passwords with us. It covers the ways deepfakes reach your audience:

• Impersonator takedown: finds fake accounts using your brand, executives' names and faces, and gets them removed.
• Account takeover protection: spots suspicious logins, logs intruders out and rotates the password automatically.
• Phishing protection: catches phishing in emails, DMs and comments before it reaches your team or followers.
• Comment moderation: hides scam links and fake giveaways posted under your content.

Want to see who's impersonating your brand? Book a consultation and we'll show you how Spikerz works.

Conclusion

Deepfakes make old scams far more convincing, and spotting them by eye is getting harder. The strongest defense is process: verify every sensitive request through a second channel, train your team, and keep attackers out of your accounts.

Then watch for the fake accounts and phishing that carry deepfakes to your audience, and remove them fast.

Book a consultation to see how Spikerz protects your brand from impersonation and deepfake scams.

Sources

1. World Economic Forum, "'This happens more frequently than people realize': Arup chief on the lessons learned from a $25m deepfake crime", February 2025. weforum.org
2. Deloitte, "Generative AI and the fight for trust", poll results from May 2024. deloitte.com