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I have one alter ego Or, as it is now known on the internet, an avatar. My avatar looks like me and at least sounds a bit like me. He constantly appears on Facebook and Instagram. Colleagues who understand social media much better than I have tried to kill this avatar. But at least they have failed so far.
Why are we so determined to end this plausible version of myself? Because he is a fraud – a “deepfake”. Even worse, he is also literally a fraud: he tries to join people with an investment group that I reportedly lead. Someone has designed him to cheat people, by operating new technology, my name and reputation and that of the FT. He must die. But can we get it killed?
I was first introduced to my Avatar on March 11, 2025. A former colleague brought his existence to my attention and I immediately brought him to that of experts at the FT.
It turned out that he was in an advertisement on Instagram for a WhatsApp group that was supposedly run by me. That means that Meta, who owns both platforms, indirectly earn money with fraud. This was a shock. Someone had a financial fraud in my name. It was so bad that Meta benefited from it.
My expert colleague contacted Meta and after a little “to-off and fro”, managed to have the offensive advertisements removed. Unfortunately, that was far from the end of the affair. In the following weeks, a number of other people, some I knew personally and others who knew who I am, brought further functions to my attention. At every occasion, Meta told us after a report that it had been removed. I was also recently registered for a new one Meta system This uses face recognition technology to identify and remove such scam.
In total we found that we came on top of this evil. Yes, it would have been a bit like “whack-a-mole”, but the number of molehills we saw seemed to be low and fall. This has proved to be wrong since then. After investigating the relevant data, another expert colleague recently told me that there were at least three different deep fake videos and several photoshopped images that had more than 1,700 advertisements with small variations on Facebook and Instagram. The data, from the advertising library of Meta, show that the advertisements have reached more than 970,000 users in the EU alone – where regulations require technical platforms to report such figures.
“Because the advertisements are all in English, this probably only represents part of their general reach,” my colleague noted. Presumably many more British accounts saw them too.
These advertisements were purchased by ten fake accounts, with new ones that appeared after some were forbidden. This is like fighting the Hydra!
That’s not all. There is a painful difference, I notice, between knowing that social media platforms are used to cheat people and make an ignorant part of such a scam. This has been quite a shock. So how, I wonder, is it possible that a company such as Meta cannot automatically identify and bring down its enormous resources, including artificial intelligence tools, such fraud, especially when they are aware of their existence? Is it really so difficult or they don’t try it, as Sarah Wynn-Williams suggests in her excellent book Carefree people?
We have been in contact with officials from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, who have focused on the advertising policy of Meta, that states that “Ads may not promote products, services, regulations or offers using identified misleading or misleading practices, including those intended to inform people from money or personal information”. Likewise, the Online Security Act Platforms requires users to protect against fraud.
A spokesperson for Meta herself said: “It is against our policy to do the public figures and we have removed the advertisements, accounts and pages and disabled people who were shared with us.”
Meta said in self-exploration that “scammers are ruthless and constantly develop their tactics to try to avoid detection, which is why we are constantly developing new ways to make it more difficult for scammers to mislead others the use of face recognition technology.” Yet I find it hard to believe that Meta, with its enormous resources, could not do better. It just should not spread such fraud.
Be careful in the meantime. I never offer investment advice. If you see such an advertisement, this is a scam. If you have been the victim of this scam, share your experience with the FT [email protected]. We must remove all advertisements and therefore to know if Meta is on top of this problem.
Above all, this kind of fraud must stop. If Meta is not possible, who will?
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