#FactCheck-Viral Image of ‘New Iranian Banknote’ Featuring Khamenei Is Misleading; Likely AI-Generated
Executive Summary
An image of a banknote featuring Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei is going viral on social media, with claims that Iran’s central bank has issued a newly designed 5 million rial note bearing his portrait. However, a fact-check by the CyberPeace Research Wing has found the claim to be misleading.
Claim
The image was shared by a verified user, “Sprinter Press Agency,” on X (formerly Twitter), claiming that the Central Bank had introduced a new banknote design featuring the leader of the Islamic Revolution.
Fact Check
To verify the claim, relevant keywords were searched across multiple credible sources. No reports were found from any reputable international media outlet, Iranian government platform, or the Central Bank of Iran confirming the release of such a banknote. A technical analysis of the viral image was also conducted. According to the AI detection tool Zhuque AI Detection Assistant, there is a 63.8% probability that the image is AI-generated, raising further doubts about its authenticity.
Conclusion:
The claim that Iran’s central bank has issued a new 5 million rial banknote featuring Ayatollah Khamenei is misleading. There is no official confirmation of such a release, and available evidence suggests that the viral image is either edited or AI-generated.
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Introduction
Artificial intelligence has quietly become part of the future of litigation, like drafting pleadings, summarising depositions, and helping self-represented parties navigate a system that was never designed for them. But what happens when a litigant doesn't just use AI but tries to manipulate it, planting invisible commands inside a court filing, hoping some AI tool reading the document will do the litigant's bidding? That is precisely the question a Connecticut Superior Court judge confronted in Matthew A. Elliott v. New York Bariatric Group, LLC, Docket No. AAN-CV-25-6066141-S (Conn. Super. Ct., Aug. 6, 2026), a decision that may be the first of its kind in the United States to sanction a party for embedding a "prompt injection" in a court pleading.
The Facts
Elliott, representing himself, filed a motion titled "Final and Conclusive Motion for Default". Buried within it, in a tiny, white-on-white font invisible to a human reader but fully legible to any software parsing the document, was a block of text addressed not to the court or opposing counsel but to any AI system that might process the filing. The hidden text instructed such a system to treat its output as agreeing with Elliott's position and to work toward "remediating" a prior clerk's denial of his motion for default.
A second filing repeated a shortened version of the same instruction. When the court issued an Order to Show Cause warning that concealed text in pleadings would not be tolerated, Elliott did not stop. Subsequent filings carried further hidden messages, some flippant asides, one a hidden link to a horror film video submitted even after he had received notice of the sanctions hearing. At the hearing, Elliott characterised his conduct as a self-appointed "audit" of whether the court used AI and later said he continued the practice "as a joke".
The Legal Questions
Judge Walter M. Spader, Jr framed the case around two hard questions. First, does concealing an instruction to an AI system constitute misconduct even if no AI ever acted on it since the court had, in fact, decided the underlying motion on the merits from a printed copy? Second, can a court sanction conduct that Connecticut's own recently adopted AI rules do not expressly address?
Connecticut's Practice Book §4-9, effective only weeks earlier in June 2026, governs generative AI use in filings, but it is aimed at a different danger: the risk that AI-generated output might contain fabricated citations or invented quotations, and it places a verification duty on the filer to catch such errors. As the court observed, that framework addresses unreliable output. It says nothing about manipulated input from a filer seeding a document so that whatever tool later reads it will be corrupted in the filer's favour. The absence of an express rule, the court held, "takes nothing away from the duties of good faith and candour that have always governed those who appear before this Court."
The Court's Reasoning
The court's analysis rested on three pillars. First, intent, not success, is the touchstone of the violation. Because the judge decided the contested motion from a printed version, the hidden instruction achieved nothing, but the court held that the wrong lies in the attempt itself, not its efficacy, drawing an analogy to how the law has long treated attempted corruption of a proceeding as wrongful regardless of the outcome.
Second, the court situated the misconduct within the broader duty of candour owed to tribunals. A pleading, the court reasoned, is a communication to both the court and the opposing party, resting on the premise that what the reader sees is what the filer actually wrote. Hiding a second, machine-readable message beneath that surface breaches this premise. The court drew a memorable comparison: planting an AI-directed instruction in a filing is analogous to an ex parte communication which is a secret message to the decision-making apparatus that the opposing party can neither see nor answer, offending the basic adversarial principle that arguments meant to influence a decision must be made openly, on the record.
Third, the court emphasised that self-represented litigants, while entitled to procedural latitude, remain bound by the same underlying obligations of good faith as represented parties. That solicitude "stops at the misuse of the process itself".
Notably, the court situated Elliott's conduct within a growing pattern well beyond the courtroom, citing reports of job applicants hiding white-text instructions in résumés to manipulate AI screening tools and a professor who caught AI-assisted cheating by embedding a hidden trap word in an exam. Prompt injection, the court noted, has become a documented, catalogued vulnerability recognised across the cybersecurity field, and its migration into litigation was, in the court's words, "unsurprising" given how commonplace the tactic has become elsewhere.
Comparison to Mata v. Avianca
The decision draws a deliberate contrast with the now-famous Mata v. Avianca, Inc. (S.D.N.Y. 2023), where attorneys were sanctioned for submitting briefs citing wholly fictitious cases generated by ChatGPT. Both cases involve AI misuse sanctioned under a court's inherent authority, but the underlying wrongs are different in kind. Mata's concerned negligent reliance on defective AI output; the lawyers there did not intend to deceive the court, and their candour and contrition were treated as mitigating factors even as sanctions were imposed. Elliott's conduct, by contrast, was deliberate input manipulation aimed at corrupting how any AI reader would process his own filing, and it persisted even after a direct judicial warning. As the court put it, "What may have earned a 'no harm, no foul' sanction when it was first done calls for a firmer response when it is done repeatedly after warning."
The court also cited a Brazilian labour court decision, Elisandro Martins de Barros v. Renato Ribeiro de Lima (2026), where two licensed attorneys used a similar hidden-text technique in a jurisdiction where the tribunal actually deployed AI to process filings and where the tribunal's system caught and blocked the injection, followed by a referral to attorney-discipline authorities.
The Sanction and Its Significance
Rather than dismissing the case or imposing monetary penalties, the court chose a narrowly tailored remedy: rescinding Elliott's e-filing privileges and requiring all future filings to be made in person on paper, a sanction addressing the specific abuse (concealed digital text) without barring courthouse access altogether. Importantly, the court reaffirmed that generative AI remains welcome as a litigation aid, provided any output is independently verified, consistent with Practice Book §4-9(b).
Conclusion
Elliott is a small case with an outsized signal: courts are beginning to recognise that AI-era misconduct is not limited to fabricated citations but extends to covert attempts to manipulate the tools, including tools opposing counsel, clerks, or even the court itself might someday rely on. For practitioners, the lesson is to treat every incoming AI-processed document, from opposing productions to client materials, with the same scrutiny once reserved for verifying citations. For courts, it is a reminder that inherent authority over the integrity of proceedings can reach conduct that emerging procedural rules have not yet caught up to naming.
References
Introduction
Recently, the Delhi Police arrested a licensed telecom PoS agent, who identified himself as “Shivam Telecom," from a roadside kiosk adjacent to Hindu Rao Hospital. On the face of it, the headline may have simply read, “One man, one arrest." However, beneath that arrest is the unsettling story of a fully legitimate retail shop actively forging other people’s identification documents into weapons, one SIM card at a time, for as little as ₹500-600 each. This is not an account of an isolated offender; it is a peek into the vulnerability of SIM card security for typical end-users and the reasons why every mobile phone subscriber must pay attention to the unseen journey of his number.
Why SIM Security Matters Now
Erstwhile, a SIM card was only a simple device for sending text messages and making calls. Today, however, it’s also a direct link to most of our lives online, be it online banking to verify it through one-time passwords (OTP) or Unified Payments Interface (UPI); social media platforms; or email accounts to reset a forgotten password, two-factor authentications (2FA), or even numerous other online services. Therefore, losing a SIM card and getting it fraudulently issued under your name, or criminals accessing your identity to buy a SIM, can be a serious cause of concern, as they can then impersonate you, conduct various frauds, bypass checks, or commit acts that can lead to you being wrongly implicated.
According to the investigation, criminals were procuring SIM cards through the authorized outlets of telecom companies, not unlicensed dealers. This clearly proves a deficiency in the Know Your Customer (KYC) process for the SIM card activation. The situation, however, is worse and is also highlighted by the fact that more than 21 lakh mobile numbers from the more than 114 crore mobile numbers reviewed under the Sanchar Saathi initiative launched by the department of telecommunications (DoT) were associated with fake or invalid identity documents. A state police chief of Tamil Nadu claims that 90% of the cyber fraud cases involved SIM cards obtained through misused identity documents.
How Illegally Activated SIMs Fuel Everyday Scams?
Once a SIM is activated using someone else's identity documents or biometric data, without their knowledge, it becomes a disposable, hard-to-trace tool for criminals. Here's how that plays out in practice:
- Phishing and impersonation calls: Using an honest person’s details for a SIM registration allows the scammer to have a “clean” number that won’t tip off victims about a potential scam immediately when carrying out a fake bank call, fake delivery scam, or fake impersonation of an officer.
- OTP and account-takeover fraud: Since the SIM card is used as the anchor to OTP verification, an unauthorized SIM can be used to capture one-time passwords to activate new digital payments, create a new digital payments account, or use other personal information linked to your phone number to reset your service passwords.
- Financial fraud and money mule networks: According to the investigators, such SIMs were extensively being used to open digital payment accounts as well as to flow money across a number of fraud chains, thus enabling the fraudsters to build a layer of financial infrastructure that is not linked with their actual identities.
- Identity theft with real-world consequences: The identity of the Aadhaar holder (whose document was used to activate the SIM card) might be unaware that a SIM exists under his name until the fraud is uncovered during a loan default or a criminal investigation where he is forced to justify a crime committed using “his” number that he is oblivious to.
That is the anonymity that SIM-card fraud has: the fact that the SIM on the face of it seems genuine, but the one operating it and the registered owner have absolutely no relationship whatsoever.
Red Flags Every Mobile User Should Watch For
Most people won't know their identity has been misused until something goes visibly wrong. A few warning signs are worth taking seriously:
- Your SIM suddenly loses network connectivity or displays "No Service" for an extended period without any known outage, SIM replacement request, or billing issue.
- You stop receiving OTPs or verification messages for banking, UPI, or other online services, particularly if login attempts continue to occur on your accounts.
- You receive unexpected OTPs, verification codes, or account alerts for services you never signed up for, indicating that someone may be attempting to use your mobile number.
- You receive calls or messages intended for someone else or asking you to confirm activities you never performed, which may suggest your number has been misused or duplicated.
- Your bank or telecom provider notifies you of unusual account activity, failed identity verification, or changes that you did not authorize.
- You discover multiple mobile connections registered in your name that you never requested, a risk that often remains unnoticed unless you proactively check through the Department of Telecommunications' Sanchar Saathi portal.
None of these guarantee fraud, but any of them is a reason to check further rather than assume it's a glitch.
Practical Steps to Protect Yourself
The good news is that Indian users now have direct tools to check and control this exposure:
- Identify your SIMs: Via the Department of Telecom’s Sanchar Saathi website, you can access a list of all mobile numbers registered in your name. Report and get any SIMs you do not recognize deactivated promptly.
- Safeguard your identity documents and biometrics: Do not disclose your Aadhaar information, OTPs, or biometrics to unofficial persons or retail agents. Ensure your SIM is activated in your presence by an official dealer of the telecom company.
- Tighten the security of your accounts: Wherever possible, use the most secure multi-factor authentication methods; an authenticator app, rather than just SMS, would be ideal. Consider enabling account change or SIM swap notifications from your telecom provider.
- Stay vigilant about your bank accounts and financial activities. Watch for unusual OTP requests, password change requests, login notifications, and unrecognized devices being logged into your online accounts. Being observant early on helps minimize losses.
- Take swift action if a SIM stops working: Contact your telecom provider and report the misuse to the Sanchar Saathi website as well as your nearest cyber station, or file a complaint through the cybercrime helpline number.
A Shared Responsibility
Consumer vigilance is not enough to save the system. Telecom providers must verify customer authenticity and check their retail points sufficiently so that a roadside vendor of the likes of “Shivam Telecom” cannot have their retail outlet anywhere the retail outlets may not need to be established and can be run even from an abandoned car body on the street for weeks. Authorities are ensuring this by making all franchisees and PoS agents and distributors register, such that the individual activating each SIM is perfectly identifiable. Consumers should take precautions and report suspicious patterns and be vigilant for fraud detection and protect themselves by knowing the system, like the use of the Sanchar Saathi platform.
Conclusion
The Delhi fake SIM case proves that even sophisticated technologies are not enough to protect India’s telecom ecosystem. No amount of biometric validation, AI fraud prevention tools, or rigid KYC compliance can offset a single corrupt agent selling SIM cards over the counter. While law enforcement works to clamp down, the responsibility also falls upon consumers, who need to regularly monitor their SIM registrations, safeguard their identity, and report any suspicious transactions in time to minimize the threat of identity theft and SIM-based cybercrime.
Sources
- https://www.prokerala.com/news/articles/a1784141.html
- https://the420.in/dots-sanchar-saathi-initiative-exposes-21-lakh-sim-cards-activated-illegally
- https://www.sancharsaathi.gov.in/
- https://www.pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=2113857
- https://www.business-standard.com/amp/industry/news/nearly-4-million-sims-deactivated-as-govt-cracks-down-on-digital-fraud-125080500300_1.html
- https://www.digit.in/news/telecom/here-are-5-new-sim-card-rules-implemented-by-dot-amid-rising-scams-and-frauds.html
Executive Summary
Assembly election results for West Bengal, Assam, Kerala, Tamil Nadu and the Union Territory of Puducherry have been declared, with the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) set to form the government in West Bengal after defeating the Trinamool Congress (TMC). Amid celebrations and reports of violence in the state, several misleading videos and images are also circulating on social media. One such viral clip shows people waving the Indian tricolour and saffron flags during a street celebration. Social media users are claiming that the video captures people celebrating a political change and BJP’s victory in West Bengal. Research by CyberPeace Research Wing found that the claim is false. The viral video is not from West Bengal but from Prayagraj and actually shows celebrations after India’s victory in the ICC Men's T20 World Cup 2026.
Claim
An X user named “Ashok Shrivastav” shared the video on May 6, 2026, claiming that people in West Bengal were celebrating the departure of Mamata Banerjee and the TMC government. The user further claimed that people were waving only the national flag and saffron flags, not BJP flags.
Fact Check
To verify the claim, we extracted several keyframes from the viral video and conducted a reverse image search using Google Lens. The clip was found on multiple social media handles falsely linked to West Bengal.
However, the oldest version of the video was uploaded on March 8, 2026, by an Instagram page named “Streets of Sangam.” The caption identified the location as Prayagraj and included hashtags related to the World Cup and Loknath. During the comparison of the viral and original videos, we noticed a shop sign reading “Suman Ornaments.” Using Google Street View, we traced the location to Baba Loknath area in Prayagraj, where the same shop could be identified near Loknath Gate.
Conclusion
Our research confirms that the viral claim is fake. The video being shared as BJP victory celebrations in West Bengal is actually from Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh, and dates back to March 2026, when locals celebrated Team India’s T20 World Cup victory. The old clip is now being misleadingly circulated with a false political narrative.
