On Thursday (Sept. 3), a few hours after the news site ICL Notícias published audio recordings and messages exchanged between federal deputy Nikolas Ferreira (PL-MG), a lawmaker from the party of former president Jair Bolsonaro, and banker Daniel Vorcaro, owner of Banco Master, a page designed to look like an official Federal Police report began circulating on social media. The supposed document concluded that the conversations showed no evidence of crime. Nikolas shared it on his Instagram stories, decorated with a heart emoji, and later deleted the post. According to the fact-checking outlet Aos Fatos, posts carrying the fake gathered at least 500,000 views on X. The Federal Police denied authorship, telling the site it had produced neither the image nor the text.
What the fake document says
The forgery imitates a page from a report tied to Operation Compliance Zero, with references to data extracted from Vorcaro's phone and to the Federal Police directorate that investigates organized crime. In the text attributed to the force, the contacts between banker and deputy are described as "of a personal and professional nature", and the conclusion is that the messages would not contain enough elements to characterize a crime or justify opening an investigation specifically against Nikolas.
The signs of fraud pile up. The item numbering jumps from 7 straight to 7.3, the text carries Portuguese errors such as "contato salvado", and it includes elements that rarely appear in official Federal Police documents, like emojis and the heading "Relatório de Análise de Dados", or Data Analysis Report. The emblem reproduced in the image differs from the official one in the design of its ribbons and in the accent over the word "Polícia", which in the real symbol is drawn as a triangle, as Correio Braziliense lists. The dates also fail to add up: production and extraction are both marked for Nov. 18, 2025, the period when Vorcaro was arrested, and messages attributed to Nikolas carry dates that differ from those reported by ICL Notícias.
There is also the trail of the machine. Aos Fatos ran the file through OpenAI's verification tool, which detected SynthID, a digital watermark embedded in content generated or edited with artificial intelligence. OpenAI confirmed to the site that the detection indicates the file went through some form of AI generation or editing. On its own the watermark does not reveal who produced the material; combined with the textual, graphic and chronological flaws, it supports the conclusion that the page did not come from the Federal Police.
From the audio to a complaint
The fake document surfaced in the wake of the ICL Notícias revelations: in messages from March 2025, Nikolas asks Vorcaro for help releasing "um ativo de minério", a mining asset tied to a former aide, and in another exchange the then owner of Master says he "bancou todos os voos", paid for all of the deputy's flights. Nikolas denied that the conversations point to any wrongdoing, and his office told Correio Braziliense he had republished content from a news portal and deleted it once he learned it was fake. This week, deputy Sâmia Bomfim (PSOL-SP) filed a complaint with the Prosecutor General's Office, the PGR, Brazil's top federal prosecution authority, asking for an investigation to be opened and for measures to protect the fairness of the electoral race, including the removal of posts containing false information.
"In an election year, in which Nikolas Ferreira is running for reelection as federal deputy, and at a moment when the investigations of the Master case are moving forward, the effects of this episode become even more damaging to the entire population", Sâmia said, in remarks registered by O Globo.
Brazil's Criminal Code sets a prison term of two to six years, plus a fine, for forging a public document in whole or in part, and the same penalty applies to the improper use of the marks and symbols of public agencies, Aos Fatos notes. On the deputy's stories, the post no longer exists. The page that fed it, with its mismatched emblem and its item 7 jumping to 7.3, kept circulating on X, where the posts gathered at least half a million views.