Deepfake It Till You Make It: Man With Fragile Ego Sentenced For Deepfaking Sexual Images Of Underaged Girls – eCrimeBytes Nibble #19

This case demonstrates that it is difficult to protect yourself from someone with time, no morals, and criminal creativity on their side. You could have posted nothing but G rated face only pictures and someone like Patrick Carey can still find a way to exploit you.

Patrick Carey used public G rated pictures of at least 14 underaged victims from a local high school to create fake pornography through deepfake technology. If you don’t know what deepfake technology is, don’t worry. Just think of it in this case as having a very convincing realistic pornographic rendition of someone’s G rated pic, generated through computer applications.

Carey then went one step further than just posting these deepfake porn files. Carey doxxed his victims’ by adding their contact information to the deepfake pornography he created. This would open Carey’s victims up to additional forms of mental and physical abuse.

Facing what reads as a lot of evidence, Carey pled guilty and was sentenced. Carey’s sentence was 6 months incarceration with 10 years probation. His sentence includes significant sex offender restrictions. Hopefully Carey’s deepfake material will disappear from the internet before he is finished with his probation in a decade, but given the internet has a long memory it looks unlikely.

Nassau County District Attorney Anne T. Donnelly announced that a Seaford man was sentenced today to six months’ incarceration and 10 years’ probation with significant sex offender conditions for sharing sexually explicit “deepfaked” images of more than a dozen underage women on a pornographic website and posting personal identifying information of many of the women, encouraging website users to harass and threaten them with sexual violence.

Patrick Carey, 22, pleaded guilty on December 12, 2022, before Judge Robert Bogle to Promotion of a Sexual Performance by a Child (a D felony); Aggravated Harassment in the Second Degree as a Hate Crime (an E felony); Stalking in the Second Degree (an E felony); and Endangering the Welfare of a Child (an A misdemeanor). Carey was sentenced today to six months’ incarceration and 10 years of probation with sex offender conditions. The defendant waived his right to appeal both his plea and the sentence. Judge Bogle also ordered stay away orders of protection for each of the 14 victims that will last the statutory maximum of eight years from the time of sentence. Carey must also register as a sex offender. 

“Patrick Carey targeted these women, altering images he took from their social media accounts and the accounts of their family members and manipulating them using ‘deepfake’ technology to create pornography that he disseminated across the Internet,” said DA Donnelly. “These incredibly brave women pieced together his depraved conduct and brought it to the authorities. They were not afraid, and they were undeterred. Now, Carey will serve jail time and undergo rigorous monitoring for the next 10 years once he is released.”

The images had been altered in what is otherwise known as a “deepfake” – convincingly superimposing the victim’s faces on other separate images of women engaging in sexual conduct. The posted images were also accompanied by personal identifying information, including full names, addresses and telephone numbers. 

Each of the women had attended MacArthur High School in Levittown and believed that the defendant was the individual who was altering and posting their images and contact information. Some reported to police that they had received notifications from social media that Carey had “screenshotted” some of the images that appeared altered on the website from their social media accounts.

https://www.nassauda.org/CivicAlerts.aspx?AID=1512

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