Doctored audio evidence used to damn father in custody battle

“DEEPFAKE” audio was used in a custody battle to try to portray a father as threatening, a family lawyer has revealed, as he warned that doctored evidence is being submitted to courts.

Byron James, a family lawyer and partner at Expatriate Law, an international firm, said that voice-forging software was used to make a fake recording of his client threatening another party in a dispute over their children.

In what is believed to be the first reported case of its kind in the UK courts, Mr James said: “It is now possible, with sufficient content, to create an audio or video file of anyone saying anything.”

Deepfakes use machine-learning and artificial intelligence to create sophisticated, plausible fake footage. The technology is available to anyone, and there are step-by-step guides on the internet.

Mr James said that while PDF and paper documents were relatively “easy” to manipulate, he warned other legal experts of the worrying threat that more technological evidence is also being tampered with and submitted to courts as evidence.

The English court system requires parties to submit their evidence prior to hearings. However, the family courts, which are notoriously secretive, are under pressure to get through hearings as quickly as possible.

As a result, Mr James, who is based in Dubai, said that “the courts take evidence such as audio recordings, visual footage and written documents at face value”.

He added: “A lot of judges are in their 50s and 60s and are not particularly tech-savvy. Unless you’re aware of the possibility of something being fake, it’s difficult to know.”

Mr James said his client, the father in a custody battle, was accused of “threatening” their children’s mother over the phone.

He said: “He was adamant that he hadn’t said it, and couldn’t explain how they had a recording … it was disclosed before the hearing and introduced as evidence and he was shocked.

Mr James added that his client insisted it was not him despite “agreeing it sounded precisely like him, using words he might otherwise use, with his intonations and accent”.

“So we started looking into an explanation and luckily we were able to get the original file, got it exported, looked at metadata and saw it had been manipulated. The judge was really shocked. It would have never occurred to him to look into that.

“Up to that point they thought they had a slam-dunk case.”

Mr James told of the case in an article to be published in the March edition of the International Family Law Journal.