Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1544378
6 maltatoday | SUNDAY • 12 APRIL 2026 FEATURE SOMEWHERE in Malta, a woman spent months talking to a man who did not exist. He had a face, a voice, and he called regularly. When he asked for money, she transferred it. When someone came to collect it in person, it was not him. The face she had grown to trust had been fabricated, frame by frame, by a machine. The man who turned up was arrested, yet the money was gone. It is the kind of case that lands on the desks of Malta's cybercrime unit with growing frequency and sophistication. Deepfakes, digitally generat- ed videos and images indis- tinguishable to the untrained eye from the real thing, are no longer the stuff of political satire or Hollywood paranoia. They are being used to defraud, to harass, and in the worst cases, to produce child sexu- al abuse material from photo- graphs that parents once post- ed without a second thought. The officers who deal with this at the Police Cyber Crime Unit office at Floriana Head- quarters are not the panicked kind. They are patient, a trait they say is a requirement for their job. What the research found In May 2025, Inspector Elton Buckingham, a senior police officer with 20 years of experi- ence in cybercrime, submitted a dissertation to the University of Malta that put the situation into reality. Surveying law en- forcement officers across five EU countries, he found broad agreement on lack of prepar- edness. Malta's own legislative posi- tion was noted: Criminal Code amendments are pending, and there are no detailed proce- dural guidelines for deepfakes in court. Maltese respondents highlighted the difficulty of proving deepfake evidence be- yond a reasonable doubt be- fore judges. Prosecutors often lacked the knowledge to evalu- ate the deepfake. Chain of custody, already crit- ical in any criminal case, was cited as particularly fraught when the evidence itself may have been digitally generat- ed or altered. When it came to national initiatives, public awareness and media literacy were Malta's primary respons- es, with one respondent noting collaboration on the EU AI Act as a notable regional effort. No specific national legislation ex- isted locally at the time the dis- sertation was written. Evolving on both sides The officers sitting across from me a year later are quick to contextualise those findings, not to dismiss them, but to up- date them. "From 2025 to this year, there has been a big evolution," one says. "As deepfakes evolve, so do our investigations and our tools. In the past year, there has been a big evolution across the board, in terms of people, knowledge, and training." They point to exactly what Buckingham recommend- ed: Targeted training, inter- national collaboration, and continuous investment. The dissertation called for officers to receive specialised courses covering detection tools, meta- data analysis, and audio-visual inconsistencies. The unit says that it is happening, with someone almost always abroad for training. "We, here in Malta, together with law enforcement outside Malta, have a community be- tween us," the superintendent explains. "Everyone shares their experiences. If someone comes across something new, they share it with us, so that even if we haven't encountered it yet, we are prepared." Like AI itself, they say, deep- fakes have their uses and their abuses, which is what keeps them busy. Frame by frame The unit uses tools built spe- cifically for deepfake analysis, software that reconstructs a video step by step, tracing how it was generated and where it was manipulated. When that is not enough, officers go frame by frame, looking for a hand that is empty in one image and occupied in the next, a face that moves just slightly wrong. "You look at it frame by frame; at how a person is moving," one officer explains. "If there are 30 frames and suddenly between one frame and the next some- thing appears that was not there before, obviously some- thing is wrong." Detection tools are continu- ally outpaced by advances in synthetic media quality, with JULIANA ZAMMIT jzammit@mediatoday.com.mt 'Once you put something online, you lose control of it forever'