Kingston Harbour, Jamaica. Billions in remittances flow through channels like this every year. In 2025, so did an AI-generated video built to intercept some of it.
In 2025, more money came home to Jamaica than in any year on record. Bank of Jamaica data reported by the Jamaica Gleaner puts total remittance inflows for the year at US$3.49 billion, up from US$3.36 billion in 2024, despite Hurricane Melissa tearing through the island in October and knocking the usual pattern of transfers sideways for two months. That figure is not an abstraction. It is rent, school fees, funeral costs, and rebuilding money moving from relatives in Miami, Toronto, and Birmingham into bank accounts and cambios across Jamaica, month after month, year after year.
It is also, increasingly, a target. In the same year remittances hit their record high, both the Jamaica Information Service and the Jamaica Constabulary Force had to issue public warnings about AI-generated videos built to sit in front of that flow of money and redirect a slice of it. Neither warning described a hypothetical risk. Both described fabricated footage already circulating on WhatsApp and social media, made with tools cheap enough that one person can run a convincing scam without any technical training at all.
A Record Year for Money Coming Home
Remittances are not a side note in Jamaica's economy. They have represented roughly 15% of GDP in recent years, a larger share of national output than the country's total exports of goods. The United States supplies the largest share of that flow, typically two-thirds or more of total inflows in any given month, with the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Cayman Islands making up most of the rest.
Hurricane Melissa tested that flow directly. Formal and informal transfer channels in the west of the island, the region hit hardest by the storm, were disrupted through October and into November, and net inflows in November came in below the same month a year earlier. The diaspora's response was swift: December 2025 remittances rose more than 13% over December 2024, as relatives abroad sent extra support for storm recovery on top of routine transfers. The dip and the rebound together are exactly what a healthy, high-trust remittance corridor looks like under stress. That trust, in relatives, in institutions, in the people whose faces Jamaicans recognise from the news, is precisely what the next problem exploits.
Two Videos That Were Never Real
In July 2025, the Jamaica Information Service had to publicly disown a video circulating online. The footage copied JIS's own programme format and branding, complete with a presenter's likeness and a synthetic voice built to match, and used it to promote a financial scheme called Markaz Trading. JIS confirmed it had no affiliation with Markaz Trading or any related scheme and urged the public to verify information only through its official platforms.
Days later, a second and more damaging video surfaced. It showed prominent Jamaican businessman Adam Stewart, executive chairman of Sandals Resorts International, apparently endorsing an investment fund called Stewart Capital. The pitch promised ordinary Jamaicans they could earn up to $1.3 million a month working from home, for a minimum stake of $42,000, and the video was distributed through social media, private messaging, and a counterfeit BBC News webpage built to lend it borrowed credibility. The Jamaica Constabulary Force confirmed the video was fabricated, that Stewart had no knowledge of or involvement in it, and warned anyone who had already engaged with the scheme to stop sending information immediately, preserve screenshots and receipts, and report the matter to the Cybercrimes Division. "The use of AI to impersonate individuals is a growing global threat, one that undermines public trust and creates new risks to financial security," the JCF said in its statement.
Why the Fake Face Works
Neither video needed to fool an expert. It needed to hold up for the fifteen seconds it takes someone scrolling a phone to decide whether to click through, and modern generative tools make that fifteen-second bar easy to clear. Voice cloning software can now produce a convincing replica of someone's voice from just a few seconds of audio pulled from a public interview, a voicemail greeting, or an old video call. Video generation tools can graft that voice onto a synthetic likeness convincing enough to survive a quick glance. None of it requires the scammer to be technically skilled. It requires only that the target trusts the face or the institution being impersonated, and in Jamaica, where relatives abroad routinely send voice notes and video clips over WhatsApp as a normal part of staying in touch, that trust is exactly the everyday habit the scam is built to abuse.
"Mi see the video wid Adam Stewart face pon it, an mi jus stop an tink. Him nuh sound like himself, an nuh man nuh guh give weh dat kind a money fi nutten. Dem tek people face now fi tief people pocket." A Half Way Tree shopkeeper, reacting to the fabricated Stewart Capital video
The Same Tools, Pointed the Other Way
Fraud detection has an advantage the fraudsters do not: transaction data. Banks and remittance companies operating in Jamaica are expanding AI-based monitoring across their channels, watching for the patterns that follow a scam, sudden transfers to new recipients, requests routed through unusual corridors, activity that spikes right after a viral video, rather than waiting for a customer to report the loss after the money is already gone. None of this happens instantly or perfectly. Compliance teams at Jamaican financial institutions are stretched thin, and a system built to flag genuine fraud without drowning staff in false alerts takes real tuning over time.
Where a single institution cannot see the whole picture, regional coordination fills part of the gap. The Caribbean AI Risk Management Council has spent years building governance frameworks for exactly this category of problem, AI systems being misused faster than any single regulator can respond to them. The Jamaica Constabulary Force's Cybercrimes Division remains the front line for individual reports, but a fabricated video does not respect national borders any more than a wire transfer does, and the response increasingly cannot either.
Where the Rest of the Work Gets Done
A police warning stops one video. It does not stop the next one, and new fakes will keep arriving faster than any single agency can debunk them one at a time. Building the applied research behind better detection, understanding how these scams actually spread across Jamaican social media and messaging habits rather than assuming they behave like scams elsewhere, is the kind of work StarApple Analytics focuses on, translating a global problem into something specific to how Jamaicans actually communicate with family abroad.
Public literacy closes the other half of the gap, and it starts well before adulthood. Teaching young Jamaicans to question a video before they trust it, the same instinct that once applied to a suspicious email now has to extend to a face and a voice, is work The Genius Project has built into its AI and STEM programmes for over a decade, well before deepfake scams gave the problem a national news cycle. The Caribbean AI Association plays a similar role for adults and businesses, running the kind of practical AI education that turns "that looks real" into "let me check the official page first."
None of these groups can arrest anyone or reverse a wire transfer. What they can do is shrink the number of people who see a fabricated video of a familiar face and reach for their phone to send money before they think to ask whether it is real.
Fraud detection is a data problem as much as a policing one. Jamaican financial institutions are now applying the same class of AI tools that generate deepfakes to catch the transactions that follow them.
The Test That Actually Matters
Jamaica's remittance corridor held up in 2025. It absorbed a direct hurricane hit, dipped for two months, and still closed the year at a record. That resilience says something real about the strength of the relationships behind the money, relatives who keep sending, institutions that keep processing, a diaspora that does not walk away when the island is in trouble.
The deepfake videos aimed at that same corridor are a test of a different kind, and it is not one Jamaica passes simply by issuing a police statement after the fact. Fabricated content will keep improving in quality and keep arriving faster. What determines how much damage the next one does is whether the fraud detection systems catch the transaction pattern before the money clears, whether the public warning reaches people before the video does, and whether enough Jamaicans have learned, the way a generation learned to distrust a lottery-win email, to distrust a familiar face making an offer that sounds too generous to be real. The $3.49 billion moved safely in 2025. Keeping the next few billion moving safely is the part nobody can take for granted.