Scammers are using AI to put real doctors, therapists and coaches into ads for supplements they've never heard of. The ads look professional, they run for weeks, and most people find out when a patient or a friend sends them a link.

This post is mainly for doctors, medical professionals, therapists, coaches with an online presence.

Here's the thing almost everyone gets wrong: they treat it as a video problem. It isn't. Every one of these ads is a small business with five moving parts - old footage of doctors or coaches, an AI clone, an ad account, a sales page and a payment processor. The video is the cheapest part and can be remade in minutes. The sales page and the payment account are expensive, slow to replace, and are where your leverage actually sits.

This post breaks down how these ads are created, why recognizable doctors, medical professionals, and coaches are often targeted instead of celebrities, where to look to determine whether your face is already being used, what evidence to capture before it disappears, and a practical 60-minute response plan to follow the moment you receive the message.

It usually happens in five simple steps. And once you understand how those steps fit together, it becomes much easier to see where you can actually fight back.

Step 1: They find footage of you

They usually don’t need to hack anything. They simply take videos you have already made public.

They look for footage where you are speaking clearly to camera, ideally with good lighting and clean audio. That could be a conference talk, webinar, podcast interview, patient-education video or TV appearance.

In one documented case, a public health professor’s real appearance at a Public Health England conference was edited to make it look as though he was talking about a made-up menopause symptom. The fake video was viewed more than 365,000 times before it was taken down (Full Fact).

In another case, a US paediatric specialist discovered that scammers had used just a few seconds of background footage from one of his most popular videos to help create a fake (AARP).

Step 2: They make you appear to say something you never said

This is where AI comes in.

They can manipulate your face, mouth movements and voice and combine them with a completely different script. The message is usually built around the same basic formula: mention a medical condition, claim that a familiar prescription drug is dangerous, introduce a “natural” alternative and then create a sense of urgency.

In Australia, for example, a fake video of a diabetes researcher claimed that a supplement had been developed at his institute and that metformin was dangerous (ABC News).

The medical claim is important because it makes the product sound credible. The more serious or frightening the claim, the more likely someone may be to keep watching and eventually buy.

Step 3: They get the fake video in front of people

Once the video is ready, they need an audience.

Sometimes they run it as a paid advertisement, using a hacked, rented or otherwise compromised business page. Other times, they use networks of fake accounts to post the same video repeatedly, with small changes each time.

Paid advertising can leave a public trail that may be searchable. Fake accounts are often harder to track.

Step 4: They send people to a sales page

The video is only the beginning. The real sales pitch usually happens somewhere else.

The person who clicks may land on a page filled with long sales copy, fake customer reviews, countdown timers and claims that the product was “formulated by doctors” or backed by medical experts.

There is another important detail here: your name may be written out as normal text on the page.

That matters because text can be picked up by search engines. Even if the fake video disappears, the sales page may leave behind clues about who is being impersonated and what product is being sold.

Step 5: They take the money

Eventually, the operation has to turn the attention into a transaction.

That means there is usually a payment processor, a company or seller behind the product, and often a subscription. In some cases, cancelling that subscription can be deliberately difficult.

And this is where the picture changes.

The first three steps are relatively cheap and easy to repeat. A fake video can disappear one day and show up again the next under a different account or with a slightly different version.

Dr. Hilary Jones told The BMJ that videos taken down from social media can simply reappear the next day under a new name.

But the final two steps are different.

A real sales operation needs a website, a domain, hosting, payment processing and a seller capable of receiving money. It also has to deal with refunds, chargebacks and complaints.

Those things leave a trail and they create points where the operation can be challenged or shut down.

That is why the most useful place to focus is often not the fake video itself, but what happens after someone clicks on it.

It can be grouped in to four reasons. And only one is about being famous.

First, people trust you and scammers can borrow that trust:

A supplement company can’t easily create medical credibility from scratch. But it can make it look as though a trusted clinician is recommending its product.

That is the real value of impersonating you. They don’t need your expertise. They just need people to believe they have it.

As one retired General Practioner who worked with The BMJ put it, creating convincing videos is far cheaper than doing genuine research, developing a legitimate product and building the credibility to sell it.

Second, you have already created the footage they need:

Think about the content you produce as part of your normal work: webinars, lectures, interviews, educational videos, podcasts and social media clips.

You made those videos to educate people and build your professional profile. But from a scammer’s perspective, they are also ready-made material: clear footage of your face, your voice and the way you speak.

The better you are at being visible online, the more useful footage you may have unknowingly made available.

Third, you don’t have to be famous:

In fact, being moderately well known can be enough.

A regional endocrinologist, therapist or health coach with 40,000 followers may have exactly the right level of visibility. You are credible enough for people to recognise and trust you, but not necessarily famous enough for everyone to immediately realise when something is fake.

The problem is becoming widespread enough that the American Medical Association has warned about physicians’ identities being used to promote products such as longevity supplements and unapproved medical devices (AMA framework, April 2026).

Fourth, it’s not really your audience they want. It’s the people who trust you:

The most valuable audience for these scams is often people who are worried, in pain or looking for another option.

Someone dealing with a chronic condition may be willing to try something they would normally question if they believe a doctor or health professional is recommending it.

That is why this is bigger than a reputation problem. When someone impersonates a clinician, they are not just borrowing a face or a name. They are borrowing the trust that person has spent years building.

Mainly four places, in this order. Twenty minutes, once a month. Or some automated tool to do these all.

Meta Ad Library: transparency.meta.com/researchtools/ad-library-tools. The only big archive you can search by keyword. Try your full name, your name with "Dr", your clinic name, and your specialty alongside a product category. One catch: ordinary commercial ads drop out of the archive once they stop running, so finding nothing today tells you nothing about last month.

Google Ads Transparency Center: adstransparency.google.com. No keyword search here, you can only look up an advertiser or a website. That makes it a second step: once you have the sales-page domain, look it up here to see the Search and YouTube ads behind it, plus the date each last ran.

TikTok Commercial Content Library: library.tiktok.com. Searchable by keyword and advertiser, with useful detail on who was targeted, but it reliably covers the EU, UK and Switzerland only, and keeps records for about a year after an ad last ran. Elsewhere, you're searching TikTok in-app for your name and specialty.

Plain Google and YouTube: Search your name in quotation marks with words like reviews, formula, discount, endorses. Set a Google Alert for your name plus "supplement". Sort YouTube by newest. And read the comments on your own popular videos, people who've been scammed often turn up there first.

Capture in order of how fast things disappear, not how upsetting they are.

One folder, six items. You'll reuse it for every report you file.

Filming a rebuttal video: Your first instinct may be to record a video setting the record straight. But that can give scammers more high-quality footage of your face and voice to work with. Respond in writing and, where useful, use still images instead. If you do record a video, keep it short and publish it only on a channel you control.

Reporting the clip instead of the operation: Taking down one video leaves the website, the seller account and the ad account untouched. Report the video and the advertiser, file with your consumer regulator, and if there's a subscription trap, complain to the payment processor.

Treating it as a defamation case: Defamation is slow, expensive, and messy across borders. The faster route is misleading advertising and unauthorised use of your likeness. In the EU, anyone publishing AI-generated content of a real person has had to disclose it since 2 August 2026 under Article 50 of the AI Act, with fines up to €15m or 3% of global turnover. An undisclosed fake ad now breaks that rule on its own.

Saying nothing to your patients or clients: Silence hands your authority to the impersonator. One dated page on your own site, "I don't endorse any supplement, here is where I actually publish", is the cheapest lasting protection you have.

Based on documented cases reported by Full Fact Organization, The BMJ and the Baker Institute, the first hour should be about preserving evidence, tracing the scam and reporting it quickly.

0–10 minutes: Save the evidence
Capture the video, the account posting it and the exact link. Save screenshots too. Don’t comment on the post, even negative engagement can help it spread.

10–25 minutes: Find the original footage
Work out which real video they used: a particular talk, webinar, interview or appearance, and when it was recorded. This tells you what material has been copied and gives you useful evidence.

25–40 minutes: Follow the money
Click through to the sales page and, if possible, all the way to checkout. Record the domain, seller name and payment processor. Then check the domain in the Google Ads Transparency Center. You may find that the single ad you were sent is just one part of a much larger campaign.

40–50 minutes: Search for the bigger picture
Search ad libraries for both your name and the product name. Look for other versions of the same scam and other professionals being impersonated. In the Full Fact case, one account was using fake videos of several academics and public-health figures.

50–60 minutes: Report it everywhere that matters
File an impersonation report with the platform, notify the relevant consumer regulator, contact your professional body and alert your indemnity or cyber insurer. In the US, for example, you can report fraud through ReportFraud.ftc.gov.

Then publish a short, clear notice telling your patients/clients that the video is fake and where they can find your genuine information.

Note: DeepfakeFinance.com can support you throughout this process, from identifying and documenting a deepfake to reporting it and tracing the scam. If you need help, feel free to email [email protected].

What scammers are really stealing isn’t your footage. They’re borrowing the trust attached to your face and name.

You can’t make your likeness impossible to copy, but you can make the real you easier to verify. Keep one page listing your official channels, use consistent handles, and give patients one simple rule: before trusting a medical recommendation online, check whether it came from your own channel.

Another useful layer is C2PA (Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity). C2PA adds tamper-evident provenance information to photos and videos, helping people see where content came from and whether its recorded history has been altered. Tools such as Content Credentials can display this information. It is not a guarantee that content is true, but it provides useful evidence about its origin and editing history.

Regulators are also paying more attention. In April 2026, the AMA called for stronger protections around physician’s names, images, likenesses and voices being used in AI-generated impersonations. In September 2026, the FTC opened a consultation on whether online advertising tools are helping impersonation scams reach consumers.

The scammers have a simple funnel: attention → trust → purchase.

Your response can be just as simple: capture → verify → report.

The goal isn’t to make fake content impossible. It’s to make the real you easier to find, easier to verify and harder to impersonate successfully.

It is a free weekly briefing you can read in under 10 minutes - covering how deepfakes are actually built, real impersonation and scam-ad cases, honest detection tool reviews, and prevention protocols that work. Written independently. Written for doctors, coaches, therapists, and online content creators whose face and voice are the business - join 1,000+ readers.

Have you seen something that didn't feel right? or Got questions you don't know who to ask? Whether you've encountered a suspected deepfake, want to understand your exposure, or just want to talk through what's happening in this space, I'm setting aside time for free 30-minute calls or email me at [email protected]