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Facepalm: They say crime doesn’t pay, but when a fake Nvidia GTC keynote on YouTube featuring a deepfaked Jensen Huang promoting a crypto scam gets five times more viewers than the real thing, you have to wonder if that’s true.
CRN senior editor Dylan Martin highlighted the fake GTC keynote on X yesterday. While YouTube says it does all it can to fight scams, the fake stream, hosted on a channel called NVIDIA Live, was the top result when typing “Nvidia gtc dc” into the platform’s search bar.
The perpetrators behind the stream would likely have been pleased to see its view count hit 95,000 viewers at one point (with a percentage them being of bots, probably), while the real GTC stream had just 12,000 viewers.
The illicit stream has now been removed from YouTube, but Martin posted an Otter.ai transcription of what deepfaked Huang talked about.
The AI avatar said that before diving into the keynote, there was a “surprise that’s too exciting to wait”: a crypto mass adoption event that “ties directly into Nvidia’s mission to accelerate human progress.”
There was then talk of Nvidia hardware crunching the complex math behind crypto mining, optimizing Ethereum smart contracts, driving Solana transactions, etc.
Fake Huang then asked viewers to scan a QR code on the screen so they could send cryptocurrencies to a crypto distribution scheme that Nvidia was supposedly launching.
There were around 40 minutes between Martin posting his first message highlighting the stream and the one confirming it had been taken down.
Deepfaking public figures using generative AI has become incredibly simply, with many results scarily convincing. Martin notes that fake Huang sounded stilted, but it’s easy to imagine that at least a few viewers were taken in by claims of Nvidia launching a crypto distribution platform.
This isn’t the first time someone has deepfaked a well-known figure to promote a crypto scam in a live YouTube broadcast. In 2025, an AI-generated version of Elon Musk’s voice instructed viewers to deposit their Bitcoin, Ethereum or Dogecoin at a certain website to automatically receive double the amount they deposited straight back. Fake Musk also appeared in several of the Linus Tech Tips channels when the company was hacked in 2023.
