Chat Group Helps Illegal Immigrants From China Enter US: Reporter | China in Focus

Welcome to China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. Our top story. An online network helping illegal Chinese immigrants cross into the U.S. Its owner says he's a cyber police officer in China. Chinese AI taking the image of a Ukrainian student and creating a fake persona of a Russian woman. And the deepfake figure is spreading Chinese regime back talking points. Delaware lawmakers taking steps to counter forced organ harvesting in China. They passed a bill on Thursday to prevent Americans from unwittingly being involved in the murder of prisoners of conscience. And cracked fields and withered crops decimating livelihoods in China. Going on no rain for two months and with no help from authorities in sight. The drought is very severe. It hasn't rained for more than two months. From finding gaps in the U.S. border wall to how to prepare to apply for asylum inside the U.S., an online network is helping Chinese immigrants cross into the U.S. legally is coming to light. All of this discovered through a single smartphone left behind at the border. A telegram group chat that contributes to the border crisis. It gives detailed instructions on how to cross the southern border and scripts for what to say when applying for asylum. Its owner claims to be a cyber police officer in China. Philip Linziki is an investigative reporter at the Daily Caller. He broke the story. And it also acts as a hub for documents detailing specific Chinese illegal immigration paths to the United States. It also contains documents that show as many as 15 border wall crossing points into the U.S., 12 of which are in California. It started when he got a tip from a who lives about 50 miles to the east of San Diego near Hokumba Hot Springs. And he found a Chinese illegal immigrant's cell phone that had been discarded on the U.S. side of the border. The owner of the phone had been getting information from a telegram group chat called the American Self-Guided Tour. Furthermore, the documents contain information that we can think of as scripts or templates for Chinese illegal immigrants to use in order to answer questions from border patrol agents and obtain asylum. The discovery comes as illegal Chinese migrants continue to flood the southern border. Eight months into fiscal year 2024, over 30,000 had crossed into the southern border, exceeding the total from last year. That's according to CBP data. A large number of them are military age adult men, raising concerns among some U.S. officials that they could engage in espionage activities for Beijing. Back to the telegram chat, its owner, Jack W., claims to be a cyber police officer in China. NTD can't independently confirm Jack W.'s identity. It's unclear if he's backed by the Chinese state, though he does appear to toe the communist party line. He bans and censors accounts that express opinions contrary to the Chinese Communist Party. After the Daily Caller article came out, someone posted it in the group chat. The owner then pinned a message banning future political discussions. Juliet Song, NTD News. AI cloning the image of a college student to create a Chinese social media campaign. The University of Pennsylvania student from Ukraine discovered an unwelcome surprise after starting a YouTube channel. Her image was used by Chinese AI to create a fake persona of a Russian woman, spreading content that favors the Chinese communist regime. Take a look. Around one month after I started my YouTube channel, I started receiving messages from people saying that they see me online speaking Mandarin and they think it's not me and someone is stealing my identity. Ukrainian student Olga Lojek was looking to create an audience on the internet. But not like this. The 21-year-old says her image has been taken and spun through artificial intelligence to create alter egos on Chinese social media platforms. This is just one of Lojek's digital doppelgangers, who appears to be a Russian woman called Natasha. She's fluent in Chinese and wants to thank China for its support of Russia. I saw that this is literally like my face speaking Mandarin and on the background I'm seeing Kremlin and Moscow and I'm like talking about things like how great Russia and China are and I'm also like my clone is advertising different Russian products. The fake accounts with Lojek's image have hundreds of thousands of followers in China, far more than Lojek herself. They've also sold tens of thousands of dollars in products. Some of the posts even include a disclaimer saying they may have been created using AI. Lojek's face is representative of an increasing number of young Russian women on Chinese social networks. The catch? None of these doppelgangers actually exist. Experts say they are AI-generated, using clips of real women found online, often without their knowledge. The avatars, like Lojek's, express their love of China and say they want to support Russia at war by selling products from their homeland. China and Russia are good neighbours. China-Russia friendship lasts forever. And then she proceeds to advertise her Russian candies and you can actually go here and you can buy the candies that she's advertising. Experts say the videos using the fake avatars often pitch products to single Chinese men. If the clone is portrayed as a Russian woman, she would talk about things like I really want to find a Chinese husband and I really want to go to China and live there for the rest of my life and have a family there because like this country is so great. So a lot of propagandist motives I was seeing there. Jim Chai is the CEO of XMOV, a company that develops advanced AI technology but not involved in Lojek's predicament. He says the technology that creates such deep fakes is very common in China. For example, to produce my own 2D digital human, I just need to shoot a 30-minute video of myself and then after finishing that, I rework the video. Of course, it looks very real and of course, if you change the language, the only thing you have to adjust is the lip sync. Actually, the only technology used here in AIGC is lip sync. Lojek's story sheds light on the risks of the potentially illegal or unethical applications of artificial intelligence. The use of deep fake technology has intensified concerns about how AI could add to misinformation, fake news and copyright issues. In January, China issued draft guidelines for standardizing the AI industry, proposing to form more than 50 national and industry-wide standards for AI by 2026. In Europe, the European Union's new AI Act imposes strict transparency obligations on high-risk AI systems. Still, many governments around the world are scrambling to catch up with the pace of AI applications, and some, like Lojek, remain caught up in the middle. This isn't the first time we've seen Chinese tech using deep fakes to spread CCP propaganda. Other cases include certain videos on TikTok that push Beijing's narrative through AI-altered figures. Now, let's take a look at one of the patterns for faked AI-generated videos. Studies show they tend to choose women to use as talking heads. China and Russia also picked up this pattern. Why women? Because data shows people are more likely to click on the videos and tend to listen to them for a longer time. The fake accounts that posed as women got more engagement, more eyeballs and had more influence than bots that pretended to be male. It turns out that China was borrowing a lesson long known to AI developers and online scammers who figured out that on the internet it pays to be female. Researchers who have studied this phenomenon say that viewers are more likely to see women as warm and approachable, and that they're more likely to interpret these kinds of fake accounts as made by real humans. Investigators in Taiwan looked into China's efforts to use fake social media accounts to meddle with their recent election. They found something surprising about the most successful profiles. Groups linked to the Kremlin have long used accounts pretending to be female in their effort to spread disinformation about U.S. elections, their invasion of Ukraine or democracies around the globe. Even Hollywood star Scarlett Johansson said she was quote shocked and angered to find her voice seemingly used by leading AI Traveling to China for an organ transplant just a few weeks after getting on the list, this may sound like a medical miracle, but the crime behind it is shocking. Delaware lawmakers are taking steps to inform people about the risks of this issue. State representatives passed a resolution condemning the Chinese regime's forced organ harvesting on Thursday. The measure aims to prevent people from unwittingly taking part in the murder of prisoners of conscience. NTD's Jeremy Sandberg has more. The Delaware House of Representatives unanimously passed a resolution Thursday condemning forced organ harvesting in China. The measure calls on lawmakers to encourage Delaware's medical community to educate people about the risks of traveling to China for expedited organ transplants and aims to prevent Delawareans from becoming unwitting accomplices in the murder of prisoners of conscience. Delaware House Minority Leader Michael Ramon sponsored the bill. He told NTD it took a lot of time and persistence. State Representative Lyndon Yerrick co-sponsored the bill. He said the CCP persecution is horrific. He doesn't want to be complicit. The resolution acknowledges a 2015 Freedom House report that found Falun Gong practitioners made up most of the Chinese regime's organ harvesting victims and references a bombshell investigative report from 2016. The report, Bloody Harvest, The Slaughter, and Update estimated China was performing 60 to 90,000 transplants a year despite the CCP's claim of 10,000 per year. Falun Gong, also known as Falun Dafa, is a meditation practice that has been heavily persecuted in China since 1999. Jeremy Sandberg, NTD News. Two months without a single drop of rain, a farmer in China's Shandong Province found herself reduced to tears as she considered the vast barren fields before her and Chinese authorities aren't offering help. Jian Junying, a corn farmer in China's Shandong Province, was moved to tears on Thursday as she realized her fields are now barren and destroyed. She, alongside many other farmers in the province's capital, Jinan, have found themselves facing ruin as drought and a heat wave have seized northern China. I hope that the government can reduce the burden on farmers. It would be best if water could be supplied to farmers. This is the voice coming from a farmer's heart. It's a difficult thing for us to say. Weeks of scarce rainfall and blistering heat have rung this part of China dry. Shandong, among them, a major agricultural province with over 7 million acres of corn planted this season alone, according to local media. Despite repairing wells and switching up planting schedules, some farmers feel helpless in the face of the crisis, including one Cui Ping. The drought is very severe. It hasn't rained for more than two months. There was no water in the river. I can only mix pesticide with tap water. On Wednesday, the authorities in Shandong issued a heat alert, warning temperatures could reach up to nearly 40 degrees. Parts of Hebei, Henan and Shandong, around and south of the capital Beijing, could see temperatures hitting 44 degrees, potentially breaking historical records for the month of June. 44 degrees Celsius is equivalent to 111 degrees Fahrenheit. Record flooding continues to sweep southern China. At least 47 people are dead in one single city in Guangdong province. Due to the Chinese Communist Party's covering up disaster casualties, the real number could be higher. Trees, roads and homes were destroyed. Bridges were damaged and farmland flooded. Chinese state media says that more severe weather could follow in other areas. Several provinces in the south and a few localities in the north are under disaster warnings. That's all for today's China In Focus on YouTube. We're now sharing a shortened version of our program here after being demonetized for three years. If you'd like to support us, consider donating. Find us at donorbox.org slash china-in-focus or subscribe to our partner platform, Epic TV, where you can watch our full episodes. Just click the link down below. Here's what to look out for in our second half. South Korea and Japan are reacting to a military treaty between Russia and North Korea. But an expert says the treaty actually targets another country, China. A subway station construction collapsed, punching a huge hole in a road. Plus, another incident at a construction site ending in multiple injuries. More on that after the break, here on China In Focus. Thanks for watching China In Focus. I'm Tiffany Meyer. See you tomorrow.