Australian Holocaust survivors targeted by AI clickbait scams

Spammers on Facebook are using artificial intelligence to create fake historical photographs of Australian Holocaust survivors to generate clickbait revenue. These AI-generated images and accompanying narratives are being used to drive engagement through fabricated stories that often contain significant factual inaccuracies.

One victim of the scam is Dr. Peter Kraus, a retired obstetrician living in Queensland. Fraudulent posts have claimed he was born in Czechoslovakia in 1936 and deported to Auschwitz. Dr. Kraus, who escaped a Nazi labor camp in Austria and emigrated to Australia in 1948, clarified that the AI-generated childhood photo used in the posts is not of him and that the biographical details are incorrect.

Investigations by AAP FactCheck and Meta’s AI verification tools have confirmed the images are synthetic. Transparency data from Meta indicates that the network of spam accounts responsible for distributing these hundreds of fake photos weekly is being operated out of Pakistan.