On Tuesday, May 12, the Ohio House Technology and Innovation Committee quietly accepted an amendment to a bill most Americans have never heard of. House Bill 185 sits in the Ohio Statehouse without much fanfare, yet it represents one of the most serious state-level attempts in the country to give ordinary people real digital likeness rights. The bill targets a problem that has quietly become a national crisis. Strangers can now use your face, your voice, and your image to commit fraud, embarrass you, or worse, and most states still treat that as a civil headache rather than a criminal matter.
The timing is hard to ignore. The FBI's 2024 Internet Crime Report attributed $893 million in losses to AI-driven fraud, and the agency openly admitted the figure is undercounted because most victims never realize an AI was involved. Older Americans absorbed roughly $352 million of those losses on their own. According to research compiled by DeepStrike, the volume of deepfake files online exploded from around 500,000 in 2023 to an estimated 8 million by 2025.
The threat is not on the horizon. It is here, and the law is years behind it.
House Bill 185 amends Ohio's existing name, image, and likeness law to remove a critical limitation. Until now, your likeness was only legally protected when it had commercial value. Pro athletes, performers, and influencers had standing to sue. The rest of us did not. Under the proposed changes, every Ohioan would have the right to control how their face and voice are used, even if they have never signed an endorsement deal in their life. Coverage in the Ohio Capital Journal lays out how the bill builds directly on NIL law to expand who counts as a protected person.
The bill also makes it a crime to prepare, produce, distribute, or exchange a malicious deepfake recording where a reasonable person could mistake the fake for reality. That language is rare in state law. Most existing deepfake statutes target political ads or non-consensual intimate imagery. Ohio is reaching further, into the messy middle ground where most everyday fraud actually happens.
For decades, our legal system has treated identity as something attached to a Social Security number, a driver's license, a bank account. AI changed the math. Your identity now also includes your face on a video call, your voice on a phone, your laugh in a podcast clip, your gait in a video your kid posted to social media. According to a Trend Micro report, criminals used AI-generated voice and video clones to impersonate executives and drain $25.6 million from a global engineering firm in a single video meeting where every person on the screen except the victim was synthetic.
That case was not an outlier. CSO Online reports that deepfake fraud drained more than $1 billion from U.S. corporate accounts in 2025, roughly triple the previous year. The same techniques that fool a finance manager will fool a grandparent on the phone, a child on a video chat, or a small business owner reviewing what looks like a routine vendor invoice.
At the federal level, the TAKE IT DOWN Act, signed in May 2025, requires online platforms to remove non-consensual intimate deepfake content within 48 hours starting this month. That is a real step forward. The first criminal conviction under the law happened in April, an Ohio man who used AI to create harmful imagery of people in his neighborhood. But the statute covers only a narrow slice of the broader problem.
Other proposals, including the Preventing Deep Fake Scams Act and the AI Fraud Accountability Act of 2026, are still moving through Congress. Senator Maggie Hassan recently sent formal letters to ElevenLabs, LOVO, Speechify, and VEED demanding they explain what they are doing to keep scammers off their platforms. The conversation is happening. The protection is not yet built.
Every conversation I have about this topic ends the same way. People ask, what can I actually do? The hard truth is that there is no insurance policy you can buy today that fully protects you from someone cloning your face or your voice. There is no app that scrubs your likeness from every model trained on the open internet. The infrastructure for that level of protection does not yet exist.
What does exist is awareness. People who understand how voice cloning scams work are far less likely to wire money to a kidnapped relative. People who know a video call can be faked are more likely to ask for a verification phrase before approving a transfer. People who understand digital likeness rights are more likely to push their state and federal lawmakers for real teeth on the issue. That is exactly why the InsureMyAvatar community exists. We are building the conversation, the audience, and the demand that will eventually pull real solutions into the market.
Talk to your family about voice cloning. Set up a code word with anyone who might receive a panicked call in your name. If you live in Ohio, contact your state representative about House Bill 185. If you live anywhere else, look up your own state's deepfake legislation tracker and see where things stand. Then take ten minutes to scan your own social presence with fresh eyes. Every public selfie, every podcast appearance, every voice memo you posted online is potential training data for someone who does not have your interests at heart.
Ohio's bill is not perfect. The Motion Picture Association has raised First Amendment concerns, and lawmakers are still working through how to balance free expression with the right to control your own image. Even so, the fact that a state legislature is treating digital likeness rights with this kind of urgency should give the rest of the country some hope and a useful template.
Being part of a community that takes digital identity risk seriously is, in itself, a form of protection. The more of us who understand what is happening and who push for action, the faster real solutions get built.
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