Globally, a 30-second clip of a CEO’s video or voice note, captured casually from a public interview or a private voicemail, can cost a company millions. Across Africa, our digital identities (the very sound of our voice, the look of our face) are now easier to steal and manipulate.
We are living through a profound, disorienting moment where the very foundation of commerce and community: trust, has quietly turned into our biggest liability.
I remember a conversation that crystallised this problem for me. An acquaintance called me one frantic evening, her voice shaking. She’d received a series of frantic voice notes on her WhatsApp, supposedly from her nephew, who she’s funding through university, claiming he’d been arrested and needed a quick N1.5 million sent to a new account to avoid jail.
The urgency was extreme, the story was believable, and critically, the voice was identical to her nephew’s. The intonation, the slight stammer when he’s stressed, the very pitch; it was all there. She was minutes from transferring the funds when her daughter, who happened to be present, suggested a quick video call to verify the location. The scammer declined, and the line went dead.
What had started as simple, clumsy text message 419 scams years ago has now evolved into highly sophisticated voice and video phishing. We used to worry about misspelled emails; now we must worry about perfect, AI-generated replicas of the people we love and trust the most.
It’s the same global epidemic that saw a finance worker in Hong Kong tricked into authorising a $35 million transfer after a seamless deepfake video call with ‘his UK-based CFO.’ The stakes, for us, are just as high.
This problem hits Africa differently.
We are a continent that has leapt ahead in digital adoption, often skipping fixed infrastructure entirely. We have embraced mobile money, fintech, and instant messaging (WhatsApp and Telegram) as the primary channels for both business and family communication.
This rapid adoption, paired with often lower levels of digital literacy, creates the perfect deepfake incubator.
Consider the tension
Data shows this vulnerability is being ruthlessly exploited. According to SABRIC (2024), deepfake-related scams targeting the South African banking and fintech sectors have surged by an alarming 1,200% in the last year. Globally, financial losses linked to deepfake fraud hit $1.56 billion in one year (Surfshark, 2025). We are not immune; we are ground zero for this new frontier of digital warfare.
Building Our Own Shield
As a founder, I had to ask: Why is the solution always built elsewhere and then retrofitted to our reality?
My vision was not to build another piece of software; it was to forge a trust-verification layer built specifically for the speed, intimacy and complexity of African digital life. We understand that here, authentication is not a luxury; it is survival. Thankfully, there are essential digital safeguards Curation AI and others. Built on the deep conviction that Africa must build for Africa, these technologies work by authenticating digital content at its source, providing an instant verification layer that confirms its provenance. They answer the one question that has become impossible to answer manually: Is this real?
The Currency of Trust
Trust is the ultimate currency of any society; it fuels commerce, holds communities together and enables governance. When that currency is devalued by technology, everything collapses.
The deepfake era is here. We cannot wish it away with higher firewall spending or more complex passwords. We must fight AI with better AI.
Africa is leading the world in mobile adoption and financial innovation. We must now lead in protective security. The time to adopt protective tools, to enforce a zero-trust model where every piece of high-value digital communication must be authenticated, is now before deepfakes become the continent’s next, and most insidious, economic crisis.
Deepfake authenticators like Curation AI are not a convenience; they are shields, and it’s time we put them on.
Kayode Aladesuyi is the founder and CEO of MYai Robotics (holding company for Curation AI and MYai Sells). He writes from Atlanta, Georgia, USA.