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I have an alter ego. Or, as is now known on the internet, it’s an avatar. My avatar looks like me, and at least sounds like me. He pops up constantly on Facebook and Instagram. A colleague who understands social media much better than I tried to kill this avatar. But so far, at least they have failed.
Why are we determined to finish this plausible version of ourselves? Because he’s a scam – “Deepfake.” Worse, he is literally a scam too. He tries to get people to join investment groups that I say are leading. Someone tricked people into designing him by leveraging his new technology, my name and reputation, and FT’s reputation. He must die. But can we kill him?
I was first introduced to my avatar on March 11, 2025. A former colleague raised his presence my attention and immediately took me to that of an FT expert.
It turns out he was on Instagram in an ad for the Whatsapp group I run. This means that the meta, who owns both platforms, was indirectly making money from fraud. This was a shock. Someone was carrying out a financial scam in my name. It was also a bad thing that Meta had profited from it.
My expert colleague contacted Meta and was able to remove the ads for violations after a bit of “towing and frewing”. Alas, it was far from the end of the incident. After that, many other people, some who I personally knew, and some who I was, and more posts brought my attention. On each occasion, after being notified, Meta said it was defeated. Additionally, it has recently been registered in a new metasystem that uses facial recognition technology to identify and remove such frauds.
Overall, we felt we were on top of this evil. Yes, it was a bit like a “carriage”, but the number of more hills we were seeing looked low and falling. This has since turned out to be wrong. After examining related data, another expert colleague recently told me that there are at least three different Deepfaf videos and multiple Photoshop images running over 1,700 ads with slight variations across Facebook and Instagram. Data from Meta’s ad library shows that the ads reached over 970,000 users in the EU alone. In this case, regulations require a technology platform to report such figures.
“All ads are in English, so this is likely just a part of the overall reach,” my colleague pointed out. Perhaps even more UK accounts have seen them.
These ads were purchased with 10 fake accounts and new ads were displayed after some ads were banned. This is like fighting Hydra!
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That’s not all. I think there’s a painful difference between knowing that social media platforms are being used to scam people and knowing that you’re becoming part of the unconscious of such scams yourself. This was a huge shock. So, do you wonder if companies like Meta, which have a huge amount of resources, including artificial intelligence tools, can’t automatically identify and remove such frauds, especially when they’re informed of their existence? As Sarah Wynn Williams suggests in her excellent book careless people, is it really that difficult, or are they not trying?
We are in touch with staff from the Culture, Media and Sports Bureau directed towards Meta’s advertising policy. Meta’s advertising policy states that “contains “anything to fraudulent money or personal information using advertising, services, schemes or identified deceptive or misleading practices.” Similarly, online safety laws require a platform to protect users from fraud.
A spokesperson for Meta itself said, “I disagreeing with our policy by pretending to be a public figure and deleting and disabling advertisements, accounts and pages shared with us.”
Meta said, “They are relentless and will continue to evolve their tactics to avoid detection. That’s why it’s the use of facial recognition technology that is constantly developing new ways for fraudsters to deceive others.” But I think it’s hard to believe that Meta can’t do anything more with that vast resource. It’s not just spreading such fraud.
In the meantime, be careful. I will not provide investment advice. If you see such ads, it is a scam. If you are a victim of this scam, please share your experience with FT at Visual.investigations@ft.com. You need to remove all ads and know if the meta is in line with this issue.
Among other things, this type of fraud needs to be stopped. If Meta can’t do that, who would do it?
Martin.wolf@ft.com
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