Was George Soros arrested by the FBI and is he currently in federal custody in Philadelphia under accusation of election interference? No, that's not true: the Canadian website that ran the story has a track record of publishing hoaxes and the screenshot of the supposed unsealed court document it offers as proof is photoshopped.
The story first appeared as an article published by Conservative Beaver on November 23, 2020 titled "George Soros ARRESTED for election interference, in federal custody - Conservative Beaver" (archived here) which opened:
PHILADELPHIA - George Soros has been arrested, and is currently in federal custody in Philadelphia. According to a recently unsealed indictment filed in the West District of Pennsylvania, Soros committed a slew of serious crimes prior to the US election.
The indictment focuses only on the criminal activity Soros participated in prior to the election, such as wire fraud, identity theft, and damage to computers.
The FBI stated that the indictment will likely be updated to reflect election interference charges in relation to Dominion Voting, once the full scale of Soros' operations is known. Soros is currently being interrogated by the FBI.
It illustrated the claim with following image that supposedly proved this was real:
However that image is a forgery. It was created by taking the (real) indictment against six Russian hackers and replacing their names with that of Soros.
You can see the original indictment here (archived here) and read more about that case here.
Earlier, the site Conservative Beaver published a hoax story claiming Hunter Biden had been arrested, which we debunked here. At the time Lead Stories Authenticity Analyst Sarah Thompson looked further into the site and came to following conclusions:
The website Conservative Beaver is less than two months old and was registered on September 19, 2020. The "About" section of the website says, "Owned and operated by Zayden Thornton, based out of Montreal, Canada." The Dibiz page link for Zayden Thornton of Conservative Beaver (archived here) shows a profile picture that appears to be a StyleGAN computer-generated face.
Screenshot of the StyleGAN profile picture of Zayden Thornton on Dibiz
The image file posted to Dibiz is 800x800 pixel square. The square format is one of the most telling signs of a StyleGAN image. For example, Thispersondoesnotexist.com creates 1024x1024 pixel images. A computer-generated blend of 5000 StyleGAN faces was posted to Twitter by @conspirator0 (shown below in the upper right corner) StyleGAN images anchor the eyes in the same position of the square. The lower blended image is Zayden's face layered as a transparency over the original composite. The image of Zayden lines up with the blended face example. Other small tells of the StyleGAN face are the asymmetrical size of the front teeth, the blobby anatomy of the right ear-lobe, the unnatural "stretch mark" patterning on the upper lip, and the "tree root" branching of the hair of the bangs. More recent StyleGAN images have improved natural outdoor backgrounds, but the flaws of the landscape are hidden by (faux) depth of field effects.
Further analysis of the Conservative Beaver website reveals that it has the same Google Adsense code as another website which quickly earned a reputation for fake news, TorontoToday.net.
Lead Stories debunked these TorontoToday.net stories late in the summer of 2020.
Fact Check: Vladimir Putin's Daughter Did NOT Die After Second Dose Of COVID-19 Vaccine
Fact Check: Officials Did NOT Say California Wildfires Were Coordinated Arson
Fact Check: Chadwick Boseman Was NOT Poisoned; No Homicide Investigation
Lead Stories took a look at StyleGAN images in this analysis article:
Fake Faces: People Who Do Not Exist Invade Facebook To Influence 2020 Elections (Part 1)
