Israel’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry winner said he was impersonated in an AI-generated video that appeared to recommend treatments for erectile dysfunction and prostatitis.
A similar video purporting to show 78-year-old Professor Aaron Siekanover peddling a solution to ED has been circulating on social media for more than two years. The Nobel laureate appeared on Israel’s Channel 12 on Monday and said he had nothing to do with the video and called it a financial and health scam.
A portion of the digitally altered video aired with the report shows Chehanover sitting in a press conference and explaining how to permanently cure prostatitis and impotence within a week and within three minutes, without drugs or degrading procedures.
Chehanover initially downplayed the situation during an interview, but said: “It’s no laughing matter. It’s frustrating and unpleasant, especially when you consider that it involves deceiving the public. There are actually two frauds going on: one financial and one health-related.”
Ciechanover said he has spent countless hours dealing with the fallout from having his name attached to the fraud case. “The problem is, you’re chasing a ghost. Scammers hide behind thousands of layers, so they’re hard to catch,” he said. “When the money comes in [an account in a Tel Aviv bank]Then you will be able to find the owner of the account. But the money is routed through 74 accounts on different continents. ”
While chasing the money feels like a goose chase, Chechanover said Facebook (which he described as the “main culprit”) can and should do more to combat fraud circulating on its platform.
The Nobel laureate asked Facebook and the Israel Internet Association to remove the AI-generated video, and they did. But Ciechanover said the problem is that Facebook allows these videos to be uploaded in the first place.
“These are fraudulent sites, [Facebook isn’t] The upload is being blocked for a simple reason. That is “money”. They receive money for these websites. “Facebook Israel knows it, Meta knows it, but they haven’t done anything or even half of it, and yet the deception of the public continues,” he told Channel 12’s Rafi Reshef.
When news of a scam using an AI version of Ciechanover first broke in early 2024, he denied any connection to the scam campaign in an interview with Israeli media Ynet.
“A group of scammers have stolen my identity and are putting my picture on ED products. Of course, I have no business with them and this is a scam. People are paying them money, but they are not receiving any products. Their money is being stolen and I have nothing to do with it,” he told Ynet at the time. “It’s important to me to warn people not to spend money.”
Ciecanover won the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for characterizing how cells use the tiny protein ubiquitin to break down and recycle proteins. A professor at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, he was awarded the 2003 Israel Prize Laureate for Biological Research.
