AI-generated Emily Blunt fronts 2,100-site recipe scam ring

A baking site called AddCakes attributes its cakes to a "busy mom" named Elena, whose kitchen shots and family photos are AI-generated images of the British actress Emily Blunt. Location data points to Morocco.

Elena is one node in a much larger network. Futurism reports that security researcher Zach Edwards, working with the ad-supply-chain firm Decrypt Ads, started from roughly 400 suspicious recipe domains and used technical fingerprints to connect hundreds more, landing at around 2,100 sites publishing AI-generated recipes under invented chef personas. The author bios inflate the fiction: Edwards describes claims that "this lady was a Michelin star chef and she worked at this fancy hotel," with recipes supposedly "carefully vetted."

"It's all a lie," Edwards tells Futurism, "and I think that the reason why we need to be holding AI publishers accountable is because they don't care about their audience."

The sites push the fake recipes aggressively onto Pinterest, Twitter and Facebook, and monetize through Russian and Chinese adtech partners — which Edwards flags as a user-privacy problem on its own, because "your data is going to, basically, authoritarian countries."

Emily Blunt's representatives did not respond to a request for comment.