Artificial intelligence is the latest way in which criminals are using technology to defraud people, with scammers creating fake baby scans to convince loved ones that they are pregnant
As her baby bump grew, so did the extent of her lies. Kira Cousins managed to fake an entire pregnancy and birth right under the noses of her family and friends.
While faking a pregnancy is rare, it is far from unheard of. For years, deceptive products like fake positive pregnancy and customised ultrasound scans have been readily available online. But now, rapid advancements in artificial intelligence are making it easier than ever to fabricate reality and deceive loved ones with hyper-realistic visuals.
Kira, a 23-year-old from Airdrie, Scotland, managed to fool those closest to her after announcing she was expecting. She shared false baby scans, hosted a lavish baby shower, and is believed to use AI-generated footage showing the “baby” kicking inside her womb.
Over several months, she posted updates about hospital appointments and tests that supposedly detected a heart defect. The tragedy behind the deception was that Kira had lost her baby in a miscarriage. Unable to face telling her partner, Jamie Gardner, she allowed the lie to snowball.
Speaking to the Sunday Mail, she said: “I think there was a bit of fear and shock as well. I’d gone through that myself. How do you tell someone that you’ve already gone through all that by yourself?
“Before all this, we had also fallen out and it was really bad. He hadn’t wanted the baby at first and I think that didn’t help. He had gone from that to, ‘Here we go, we are actually going to have it,’ and then I want to wanting it.”
Keira eventually announced she had given birth to a baby girl weighing 5lb 4oz, named Bonnie-Leigh Joyce, until her lies unravelled and the truth came out.
In reality, the “newborn” was a realistic plastic doll. She kept family members away from the doll to maintain the ruse, tricking even Jamie into believing he was a father.
The deception emerged, after she gave a lift to some of Gardner’s relatives, while the doll was in the back seat.
“It all came out days after we had picked Jamie’s relatives up from a birthday party,” she said. “The doll had been in the back of the car. I had been thinking, ‘How do I get out of this now?’ When the kids got out of the car, they said to their mum, ‘That was a doll’.
When the truth finally unravelled, Kira shifted blame onto her victims, telling the Scottish Mail that anyone who believed her “was stupid” if they couldn’t tell the doll was fake.
“No one was near that doll except me and Jamie. So if anyone should have known, it was Jamie,” she claimed. Jamie, meanwhile, simply stated that he wants to “get as far away from her as possible.”
Months before Kira’s story came to light, 23-year-old Libby Vernon from Staffordshire spun a similar web of deception. Over 13 months, she fabricated a fake life – including a job, home and relationship – to a man she met online, before tricking her partner into twice believing she was pregnant.
In November 2023 she sent him fake baby photos with the message: “Someone to meet you.” But after claiming to give birth to a daughter named Athena, she refused to let him see the baby. Vernon then told him the child had died of sudden infant death syndrome, leaving him heartbroken, and even sent him a fake death certificate.
In a second scheme, Vernon then claimed she had fallen pregnant again – this time with twins. Her lies collapsed when she messaged the man claiming she was in pain and bleeding. He persuaded her to go to the hospital. Suspicious after she claimed her appointment had been pushed back, he asked maternity staff to perform a scan, despite her reluctance.
At that point, it was found she was wearing a fake baby bump, Prosecutor Pamela Fee said. “Everything she had told him was lies,” she added.
“There were no babies. Scan photos were false, letters were false and everything she told him about being pregnant and carrying his children was a lie.”
A statement from the victim, which was read to the court, said he had been “really struggling emotionally” thinking that the twins should have been born by now.
It read: “Everything was a lie. She also told me she lied about her mum having cancer, she was sacked from the nursery she worked at and was seeing other people while we were together. I want her to understand what she has done. I have been feeling really done. Once it got to October, when the twins would have been due, I’ve been really struggling emotionally. I have been so low thinking they were supposed to be here.
“I can’t understand why she would do this. The fact that she can be, so nonchalant about it, the fact she can laugh about it on the phone, it just hurts me more. It goes round my head, I start thinking about what she did and about the babies that aren’t here. I know they were never real but they are to me. It’s one thing to get over the fact that I’ve been lied to in a relationship but a whole different thing to grieve the loss of children that never existed.”
Vernon pleaded guilty to ten charges, including sending false communications with intent to cause harm and sending a false death certificate. She was jailed for six months and handed a two-year restraining order. The victim later told how had been left grieving babies that never existed.
A quick search online reveals how easily these deceptions can be staged. Fake positive pregnancy test can be bought for under £5, while AI tools generate personalised baby scans.
Now, generative AI tools like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E 3, and Luma are taking the deception further. By simply typing prompts in, users can generate realistic maternity photos, pose with fake bumps, or create realistic videos of a moving stomach in seconds.
Dr Abdullahi Arabo, Associate Professor of Cyber Science and Network Security at University of the West of England, Bristol warned the Daily Mirror that governing these tools is becoming an uphill battle: “Every single day, technology is getting powerful, and people who want to misuse will find a way.
“Controlling these tools is getting harder because they develop faster than than we can regulate them.”
While AI video quality is improving, there are subtle cues that can expose it, he added. “If you look closely at the videos, the facial expressions are not very real. The way they talk, the way their lips sync back to what is said, how they move their body, it’s different and unnatural.”
Using AI in this manner is “dangerous”, cautions Dr Arabo, asking: “How do we stop that happening? I mean, we have seen before, on X, where the Grok agent could easily undress somebody when you give them a picture.
“That’s the thing that you have to be aware about as a pitfall of AI agents. But how do we how do we govern that? How do we make sure that we educate people about the difference between how a human being talks and and how how an agent talks?”
But why do people go to such lengths? Dr Sandra L Wheatley, an Associate Fellow and Psychology consultant, says fake pregnancies usually stem from deep-seated psychological needs or trauma.
She said: “For some, it’s about wish-fulfillment – someone who has been trying to get pregnant for a long time seeking positive attention from family and friends. In other cases, it’s about control or entrapment. If a relationship is breaking down, someone might claim they’re pregnant to prevent their partner from leaving. “About 80% of the time, it’s about something that is missing or lacking in their own life. They wish their reality was different.”
Dr Wheatley notes that while most pregnancy deceptions occur during the first trimester, carrying a fake bump through to a ‘birth’ points to severe emotional distress.
It indicates that someone is often “looking for external validation, they don’t have much self-belief or confidence in themselves. They might feel high levels of anxiety and they might be depressed,” she said.
However, she emphasises that the underlying traits that drove them towards these elaborate schemes can be redirected, adding: “They are people who are actually showing a great deal of strength and ability to control emotions, and that can be done for the good as well as something that can be harmful for themselves. I think it’s important to remember, that if somebody is feeling like this, and feels so desperate, their level of emotional intelligence shows that what could be done for good.”