Recently, Canadian content creator and entrepreneur Katie Steckly discovered someone was selling deepfakes of her on Fiverr for $8

“This was pretty disturbing to find and at first I was totally at a loss for what to do about it,” Steckly said in a YouTube video posted in April, after learning about the illegal use of her image through her followers.

“Somebody who follows me DM’d me saying: ‘Hey, I came across this person selling videos of you on Fiverr. I thought you might want to know about it.’ And that’s what led me to report it.”

Fiverr, the Tel Aviv‑based marketplace launched in 2010, removed the listing within five hours of it being reported. But the creator is now worried about how many other gigs using her image might still be out there, quietly generating profit for fraudsters.

“For all I know, there could be dozens of people selling deepfake videos of me on Fiverr and I’d have no way of knowing unless I just stumbled upon them. So what does this all mean for the future of content creation? I think we’ve all been feeling like the advent of AI‑generated video represents a huge shift in the world of content creation,” says the influencer, known for her tutorials on social media strategy and digital entrepreneurship.

Over the past couple of months, Euronewsweek received tips from several readers reporting that Fiverr — a marketplace boasting 2.9 million annual active buyers as of March 2026 — hosts a growing number of photo and video services created using someone else’s image without permission. So we decided to investigate.

Brands Ordering Fiverr Videos Built From Stolen Images

It didn’t take Euronewsweek more than ten minutes to stumble across several sellers replicating the same business model that targeted Steckly: a testimonial offer featuring a short AI‑generated sample video, created without the knowledge or consent of the real person whose image was stolen.

The offers are tempting, too. For around $10, you can buy a 25‑word ‘testimonial’ by Brenda Turner, an American online business coach and creator with over 420k YouTube followers. Looking for someone more British? There are multiple listings offering digital versions of Jade Beason, the London‑based content strategist and founder of Creator Club, who has over 300k YouTube subscribers — all for just over $5 to act as your “official spokesperson”.

Of course, creators with hundreds of thousands of followers are not lending their image for that kind of money. But many of these gigs are packaged to look like they’re coming from small, down‑to‑earth UGC creators trying to make a few extra dollars online — and unless buyers recognise the face, they may unknowingly commission an illegal video to represent their product or service.

“I think a lot of these lesser‑known or more sketchy brands with smaller budgets are going to be tempted to try it,” says Steckly. And she’s ready to fight back. “Basically, if you scroll across a suspicious ad of me promoting some e‑waste tech product on TikTok, know that it’s not me. Ignore it — and actually let me know. If you see a deepfake ad of me in the wild, I really want to know.”

Euronewsweek reached out to Jade Beason, the real one, and a member of her team categorically denied she had any knowledge of her image being used on Fiverr.

“This is definitely not Jade,” her team confirmed via e-mail.

A problem that goes far beyond stolen likenesses

The illegal use of a celebrity or influencer’s image to create unauthorised videos for sale goes far beyond the AI avatars produced on platforms such as HeyGen, Synthesia and Kling 3.0 and sold on Fiverr.

“Theoretically, right now any brand could be using any creator’s likeness they want to create ads for themselves — and this majorly threatens the credibility of content creators. When it comes down to it, a creator’s credibility and integrity is their livelihood,” Steckly explains in her video alert.

“If your audience doesn’t trust you, how are you supposed to influence them? If a brand created a deepfake ad using me, you might come across it, trust it because of our relationship, buy the product — and if it turns out to be rubbish, you’d lose trust in me. That’s terrifying, because your credibility ends up outside your own hands when other people can make videos using your face and voice.”

For those ordering photo and video content from marketplaces, the low investment can turn into an expensive experience.

“If your AI tool or marketing campaign goes rogue, you may simply be crushed by a six- or even seven-figure lawsuit from a bigger player, copyright or trademark owner,” warns practising attorney and member of the European Law Institute, Dr Ilia Kolochenko. “This is not to mention reputational damage and loss of customers due to the negative media coverage of another AI debacle that may follow.”

How Fiverr is enabling people to sell fraudulent services

In early May 2026, Euronewsweek conducted a series of tests to see whether these suspiciously cheap Fiverr gigs were actually delivered by the people shown in the ads.

We set a budget of under $20 per order and targeted gigs using images of established influencers with over 300k followers — people who would never offer endorsements at such low prices.

The first red flag: identity mismatches. Many sellers used stolen images of real creators but changed their names, creating multiple accounts featuring the same faces under different identities. For disclosure, it is not against Fiverr’s terms and conditions for sellers to create multiple gigs.

To confirm the real identities, we took screenshots of gigs priced between $5–$20 and ran reverse image searches on Google. Every time, the results led back to the real creators’ online presence — from Facebook to TikTok to personal websites. From that point on we could find the real identity of the faces being used on Fiverr, but that was just the beginning.

After agreeing on a price and timeline for delivering the service being sold on Fiverr as genuine, Euronewsweek also asked the seller to confirm that no AI was being used in the process of creating the content being commissioned. Their answers were consistently along the lines of: “All content is delivered by a human and no artificial intelligence was deployed in the making of the testimonials about to be purchased.”

However, once the orders were delivered, it didn’t take much effort to detect the flaws. A quick run of “Brenda’s” video through TruthScan, an AI‑powered content‑authenticity and deepfake‑detection platform, returned a 95% probability of it being a synthetic content. We then ran the video supposedly featuring influencer Jade Beason through Hive Moderation. The results were not reassuring either: the AI‑powered content‑moderation platform, used by social networks and enterprises to detect unsafe content at scale, labelled it as likely to contain AI‑generated or deepfake imagery — with the probability also of AI‑generated speech exceeding 76%.

Euronewsweek has reached out to Fiverr

To understand how Fiverr — which reported $105.5 million in revenue in Q1 2026 — vets its sellers, Euronewsweek contacted both its press and legal teams. We asked what vetting processes the company has in place to ensure that the person offering video content is actually the person featured in the videos being sold. We also asked what guidance Fiverr could offer to help small businesses avoid purchasing fake gigs.

Euronewsweek also asked a crucial question for those using marketplaces to commission content: who is legally responsible if a brand publishes a video purchased through the platform that later turns out to have used someone else’s image or voice without permission — whether liability falls on the buyer, the platform facilitating the transaction, or the seller.

Fiverr did not respond to any of these questions, nor did it comment on the issue of legal responsibility.

After failing to hear back from Fiverr’s official media and legal channels, we contacted Fiverr customer support.

As part of our enquiry, we informed the company about allegedly fraudulent work delivered through its platform involving the use of AI to impersonate other people. We also explained that the content had been flagged as a deepfake by multiple content moderation platforms.

After asking us to send the video delivered by the seller, a customer support representative recommended that we contact the seller directly to resolve the issue.

We pushed back, refusing to engage with a seller we believed to be fraudulent.

A third Fiverr customer support representative then responded:

“I’ve forwarded your enquiry to the relevant team for review. We’ll update you on this ticket once we have an update.”

It has now been more than a week since we last heard from them.

“There is good reason to believe that AI‑generated voices will soon be indistinguishable from real ones, both in naturalness and identity. While this should be seen as a triumph for those advancing generative technologies, it also raises serious public‑safety concerns,” concluded a 2024 study led by Hany Farid, professor at the University of California, Berkeley, on how convincingly AI‑generated voices can mimic real ones.

Our special coverage investigating how fraudsters are selling videos on Fiverr continues on Monday, when we will publish an exclusive article on What can content creators do to protect their image from deepfakes?