A video circulating online supposedly shows Pasig City Mayor Vico Sotto promoting an investment project that promises extra income. This was manipulated using artificial intelligence.
On April 5, a Facebook page posted a three-minute and 54-second report about a financial program supposedly created with the government’s help. The video carries the logos of ABS-CBN and TV Patrol and the headline:
“The President of the Philippines is being urged to declare war by Vico Sotto.”
At the seven-second mark, broadcaster and TV Patrol host Jeff Canoy can be heard saying:
“Vico Sotto made a sharp statement addressed to the President. He spoke directly to the President in order to promote his position.”
The rest of the video are clips of Sotto purportedly urging President Ferdinand Marcos to “declare war on poverty” and encouraging the public to invest in a financial scheme and providing instructions on how to do it.
At the one-minute and 34-second mark, the man in the video says:
“When I saw that this really works, I said, my people need to know about this. The program has already helped thousands of Filipinos earn from 235,000 pesos per week. Housewives. Retirees. Ordinary workers. People who had never invested before. People who didn’t understand finance at all. Now they are giving their children things they themselves never had. How is this possible? 15,000 pesos. That’s all you need to start. That’s less than you spend on unnecessary things in a month. The program guarantees that if you don’t see results within one month, you will get all your money back.”
This report is fake. A video clip of Sotto at an anti-corruption forum in December last year was altered to make it look like he is promoting an investment project.
On Dec. 10, 2025, ANC24/7’s official YouTube channel uploaded the original video of Sotto speaking at a forum celebrating International Anti-corruption Day.
The mayor talked about corruption, particularly kickbacks in local government projects and the importance of making corrupt officials accountable with the help of ordinary citizens. Nowhere in his speech did Sotto endorse a government financial investment program.
VERA Files also compared the original and the fake video frame by frame and observed that the mouth movements were altered and an audio clip imitating Sotto’s voice was added. These techniques are common in AI-generated scams that VERA Files has previously debunked.
In an April 5 FB post, Canoy also disowned the circulating video that he labeled as “AI-generated disinformation.”
Sotto later on shared Canoy’s post in his official FB page. He also posted a statement debunking other fake and AI-generated videos that misrepresented him to scam people.
VERA Files reached out to the Deepfakes Analysis Unit of the India-based Trusted Information Alliance to check if the video was manipulated using AI.
DAU ran both the video and the audio clips through AI-detection tools.
Three out of four AI-detection tools classified the audio as likely AI-generated. Results from Hiya showed that the voice was modified by AI, Hive AI audio classifier noted that the entire track has been AI-generated except for the last ten seconds and Aurigin AI classified some segments as also created using AI. Results from ElevenLabs speech classifier showed that the audio track is “very unlikely” to be created using the ElevenLabs platform.
DAU also ran the video in Hive AI deepfake detector but only a few frames showed possible indicators of AI tampering.
According to the DAU’s manual analysis, the “lip-synchronisation is well done, but the delivery sounds very robotic” with some minor audio glitches.
The video is AI-manipulated based on VERA Files’ own analysis and DAU’s additional insights.
The fake video circulated four days after data science firm Arkipelago Analytics released their voting preference survey for the 2026 Senatorial Preferences, ahead of the 2028 national elections, with Vico Sotto topping the list – tied with Davao City Mayor Sebastian Duterte and Sen. Raffy Tulfo.
VERA Files debunked another AI-generated video promoting online gambling applications featuring Sotto and other fake TV patrol reports that promote scam investment projects.
The post by the FB page Danielle’s Digital Playground (created on March 10, 2021) garnered 281 reactions, 18 comments and 4,000 views.
