A hundred thousand dollars sounds plausible, but the hard number is **$680,000**. Deepfake fraud surged 550 percent since 2019, morphing from a celebrity public relations nuisance into a catastrophic corporate security vulnerability that the financial sector wants neutralized immediately. Cash is bleeding. Regulators cornered X. In early 2026, the government specifically threatened to revoke Safe Harbour over a massive flood of hyper-realistic illegal AI images. The internet flooded.