Deepfakes Are a New Crime. Rewriting Someone Else's Image Is an Old One.

An estimated 8 million deepfakes are now circulating online, up from roughly 500,000 in 2023 — a sixteenfold increase in under three years, growing at close to 900% annually. Deepfake fraud now accounts for about 6.5% of all fraud attempts globally, up from a mere 0.1% in 2022, and CEO-impersonation deepfake scams alone are now reportedly attempted against approximately 400 companies every single day.

How Bad the Detection Problem Actually Is

The uncomfortable part isn't just how many fakes exist — it's how bad humans are at catching them. A 2025 study by the identity-verification firm iProov tested 2,000 consumers against a mix of real and deepfaked images and video, and found that only 0.1% correctly identified every single fake and every genuine item — meaning 999 out of every 1,000 people failed the test. For high-quality video deepfakes specifically, human detection accuracy sits at around 24.5%: worse than a coin flip. US deepfake-related fraud losses reached an estimated $1.1 billion in 2025.

Ancient Egypt Had Its Own Version of Identity Fraud

Long before a laptop could fabricate a face, Egypt had already worked out how to fabricate — and erase — a ruler's identity, carved directly into stone. Ramesses II, arguably ancient Egypt's most prolific self-promoter, routinely usurped monuments and statues originally built for earlier pharaohs: his workers would re-chisel the cartouches — the oval hieroglyphic seals carrying a ruler's name — on existing statues and reliefs, replacing a predecessor's identity with his own, effectively claiming someone else's completed work and someone else's legacy as his.

The reverse happened too, and it's better documented: after Hatshepsut's death, one of ancient Egypt's few female pharaohs, her successor Thutmose III — for reasons historians still debate, whether personal, political, or dynastic — ordered much of her image and her cartouches chiseled off temple walls, her statues smashed or buried, and her name largely omitted from later official king lists. Visitors to her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahari today can still see the exact spots where her figure and name were deliberately cut away, the damage as legible as the reliefs that survived intact beside it.

Same Motive, Radically Different Tool

• Then: rewriting or erasing someone's identity to claim their achievements, or deny their legitimacy, required a mason, a chisel, and years of labor on a single monument
• Now: a deepfake can fabricate a convincing false identity, or discredit a real one, in minutes, and distribute it to millions within hours
• The underlying vulnerability being exploited hasn't changed at all — people trust what appears to be attributed to a specific face or a specific name
• What changed by many orders of magnitude is speed, reach, and how little skill or resource it now takes to attempt it

That's the genuinely useful way to think about the deepfake problem: it isn't a new kind of deception, it's an ancient one — recarving whose name sits on the work, whose face sits on the achievement — running at a speed and scale no chisel could ever match. A usurped cartouche altered a single monument, discoverable by anyone who compared it closely enough to the surrounding stone. A modern deepfake can alter what millions believe before anyone gets the chance to look closely at all.

Stand in front of Hatshepsut's temple today and the erased cartouches are still readable as erasures — a 3,500-year-old identity fraud left visibly unresolved in the stone. It's a strange, useful thing to have in mind the next time a convincing video shows up in your feed.