AI-Faked Photos of a PNG Celebrity Are Fuelling Facebook Scams. Her Country Is Racing to Catch Up.

Key points

• Jennifer Baing, a Papua New Guinea television host, identified close to 100 fake Facebook accounts using her name and AI-manipulated photos as of mid-2025.
• PNG's government plans to introduce amendments to its Cybercrime Code Act in November 2025, targeting AI-generated fakes, voice cloning, and digital impersonation.
• PNG's dedicated cybercrime unit has just seven officers to cover a population of roughly 10 million people.
• PNG Assistant Commissioner of Police Hodges Ette confirmed he personally viewed a deepfake image of three clothed women that reappeared days later showing them naked.
• Pacific nations including Fiji, Tonga, PNG, and Vanuatu have signed the Budapest Convention on Cybercrime, an international treaty that helps countries share digital evidence across borders.

Jennifer Baing was scrolling Facebook when she found a photo of herself in revealing lingerie. The image was completely fabricated.

Criminals had used AI, meaning software that can automatically alter or generate realistic images, to manipulate photographs taken from her public social media accounts. Baing is a well-known former television host in Papua New Guinea, with a large following built around traditional food and farming content. The fake images showed her apparently handing out cash, and were used to advertise fake giveaways. People were asked to send money for the chance to win a prize that never existed.

"Our photos are being abused, and our public standing is being abused by these scammers," Baing told ABC News Australia.

She had found close to 100 fake accounts impersonating her. She reported them repeatedly. They stayed up.

Why should ordinary people care about what happened to one celebrity?

Because the same technique works on anyone with a public photo online, which is most of us. The criminals need only a few pictures. AI tools then do the rest, swapping faces onto other bodies or generating entirely new images that look believable at a glance. The fakes are then used to run scams, spread false information, or in some cases create sexual images of people who never consented.

PNG Assistant Commissioner Ette described a case he saw personally: a photo of three fully clothed young women that reappeared days later with their clothing removed. He said young women had died by suicide after images like this circulated. "The level of stress mentally is so serious," he said.

The failure mode here is visibility. A scam running on a hundred fake accounts, reported by the real person whose face is being used, and still online. That is a platform moderation problem as much as a law enforcement one.

PNG plans to fix the law side of this in November, with proposed amendments to its Cybercrime Code Act that would specifically criminalise AI-generated sexual images, fake voice recordings used to defraud people, and digital impersonation. Other Pacific nations are moving too. Vanuatu updated its Harmful Digital Communications Act last year. Samoa has no standalone cybercrime law at all, though its government lists fixing that as a priority under its 2026 National Cybersecurity Strategy.

New laws help. But seven officers covering 10 million people is the operational reality. One thing the post-mortem will say, every time: the rules existed before the capacity to enforce them did.

If you see an online offer that asks you to send money first in order to receive a larger prize, stop. That is a scam. Report the account. Do not send money.

Operational takeaway: Platform reporting tools are not a fix if platforms do not act. Victims need a direct escalation path, not a ticket queue.