Can a video call be faked by someone pretending to be a person I know?

What real-time deepfakes can and cannot currently do, the weak visual tells and why you should not depend on them, and the out-of-band checks that work regardless.

Difficulty: beginner
Time: 8 min
Read: 3 min
Safety: caution

Short answer

Yes, and well enough to matter. Live face and voice replacement is good enough that judging by eye is unreliable, especially on a compressed call on a phone. Treat a video call as evidence of nothing where money or access is at stake. Verify out of band: ring the number you already have, or use a word agreed in advance.

Video used to settle it. It no longer does, and the shift happened quickly enough that most people's instincts have not caught up. Businesses have lost large sums to calls where several apparent colleagues were synthetic, and the same technique reaches individuals through romance fraud and family impersonation.

Safety

Video is no longer proof of identity where money is involved. Real-time face and voice replacement has been used in fraud against businesses and individuals, and detection by eye is unreliable. Never authorise a payment or a change of bank details on the strength of a video call alone, however convincing the person on it appears.

Step by step

Understand what is currently achievable.Real-time replacement of a face, and of a voice, is available and cheap. Quality varies, and compression on a normal video call hides most of the flaws that would be visible in a clean recording.
Know the visual tells, and know their limits.Edges around the face and hair, odd behaviour when a hand passes in front of the face, a face that does not turn fully in profile, lighting on the face that does not match the room, lip movement slightly out of step with sound. Any of these suggests a fake. None of their absence proves anything.
Ask for a movement that is awkward to synthesise.Turning fully side-on, standing up and walking away from the camera, passing a hand slowly across the face, holding up an everyday object and rotating it. Useful, but treat a pass as weak evidence, not proof.
Use out-of-band verification instead.End the call and ring the person on the number you already hold. For a colleague, ring the company switchboard. This is the check that does not depend on how good the fake is.
Agree a word in advance with family and with your team.One short word, never typed into a message, known only to the people who need it. It is the only check that is unaffected by the quality of the imitation.
Never let a video call authorise money.Payments, changes of bank details and access to systems should require a separate, established process. That rule is what protected the companies that did not lose money.
Reduce what is available of you.Long public videos of your face and voice are the raw material. Restricting who can see your posts does not eliminate the risk but it reduces the supply.
Report it.Action Fraud, or Police Scotland on 101 in Scotland, and the platform. If a colleague or a company was impersonated, tell them at once — they are usually being targeted more than once.

Tips

A refusal to go to video used to be the warning sign in romance fraud. Now a willingness to go to video is not the reassurance it was, which is why the money rules matter more than the identity checks.
In a business context, the practical control is procedural rather than technical: no payment or bank detail change is ever made on the instruction of a call alone, whoever appears to be on it.
Detection software for synthetic video is unreliable and gives false results in both directions. Do not build a decision on it.

Common mistakes

Treating a short video call as identity verification — A short, low-resolution, compressed call is the easiest condition for a fake to survive.
Relying on a challenge question — Answers to personal questions are frequently available from social media and breaches. A pre-agreed word held by nobody else is stronger.

Questions people ask

How common is this actually?

Rare compared with texts and phone calls, and rising. It matters most in high-value contexts — business payments, house purchases, investment fraud — where the effort is worth it to the criminal.

Can I detect it by asking them to turn their head?

Sometimes. A full profile turn is still difficult for many tools. But treat a successful turn as weak evidence rather than proof, and verify out of band anyway.

What if it is a colleague asking for an urgent payment?

End the call and ring them on the internal directory number, and follow the normal payment approval process. Urgency plus a bypassed process is the entire shape of this fraud.