An 80,000-follower mining influencer was AI, and Meta deleted her

The Instagram account @bindiidotraye followed more than 80,000 people's idea of a Perth mine worker for months: shifts in high-vis, off-swing days at the beach, West Coast Eagles games, mates in the background. On September 24, ABC News reported that Bindi Raye does not exist. Every frame of her was generated.

Meta removed the account on September 30. The company confirmed to PerthNow that it deleted the profile for violating its deceptive identity policy, and TikTok has added labels to the page's videos stating that the account "contains AI-generated media".

The giveaway was never a single frame. The ABC's investigation, verified by an independent expert at the University of Queensland's Cyber Forensics Lab, found frequent misspellings, distorted backgrounds, lip movement that did not match the audio and facial features that shifted between cuts. Priyanka Singh, a cyber-security lecturer at the university, told the ABC: "It seems to be almost 100 per cent AI-generated."

The persona was built to sell. The Instagram bio pointed to a paywalled Fanvue account where the content was adult video, and Fanvue's own description of that page was the only place in the whole operation that mentioned AI. Fanvue's head of trust and safety, Rob Haywood, confirmed to the ABC that Bindi Raye is an AI creator, and said about 75 per cent of the platform's creators use at least one AI tool. He also said every account, including fully AI personas, is linked internally to a verified real person. The ABC reported that the identity of whoever runs the Bindi Raye accounts is not known.

One detail makes the fabrication harder to wave away. Bindi Raye appears in some clips wearing a work uniform carrying a real mining company's logo, and the company told the ABC that nobody with that name or appearance has ever worked for it.

Meta's rule is not that AI-generated people are banned. "While AI-generated content is not against our rules, misleading people about who is behind an account is, and we require people to disclose when they post realistic AI-generated content," a Meta spokesperson said in the statement the ABC and other outlets carried, adding that no method of detection is foolproof. TikTok said it is continuing to invest in technology to improve AI detection.

Bindi Raye is not a one-off. Emily van der Nagel, a research fellow at Monash University, told the ABC that tailoring the persona to the mining sector was likely a deliberate marketing decision, aimed at one of the country's better-paid workforces. Perth adult-content creator Rosie Clarke said she had been warning her own subscribers, and that a separate profile had used her body with another person's face. In July, ABC News Verify found that an Australian influencer's humanitarian videos had been made with AI.

The lesson for anyone building an audience on AI-generated footage is now a platform rule rather than a matter of taste: disclose the fabrication, or the account goes.