Chapter 11: A Famous Face in an Advertisement

Tuesday Night, Week 8

It is a week since I blocked Adrian, and last Thursday's cooking evening was loud, warm and full of real people. Now it is almost midnight and I should be asleep, because I have a practical class at nine. But Felix has just sent something to the family chat, and I need to write it down before I forget how it made me feel in the first few seconds. That first feeling is the important part, I think.

It was a short video, about a minute long. Felix wrote under it, "Is this real? Dad says it might be." In the video sits a man I have known all my life without ever meeting him. He is the presenter of the Saturday-evening quiz programme that our family has watched together since I was small enough to sit on the rug in front of the sofa. He has grey hair, round glasses and a laugh that makes Mum laugh too. I am not going to write his name in this diary, because this entry is not about him but about what someone has done with his face.

In the video he is sitting in what looks like a studio, with soft lights behind him. He leans towards the camera and says, in his warm, slow voice, that he has kept a secret for a long time. He says that a trading platform has made his family "secure for life", that he wants ordinary people to have the same chance, and that viewers who start with a small amount are "seeing their money double within weeks". Then a button appears at the bottom: "Find out more before places run out."

Here is the honest part. My first thought was not "This is a scam." My first thought was, "Oh, it's him." I felt a little warm and safe, the way I feel when his programme starts on a Saturday evening at home. For two or three seconds, his face did my trusting for me, before my brain had even woken up. Then the words "double within weeks" arrived, and something in my stomach went cold.

I pressed nothing. I wrote in the family chat, "Please nobody press anything in that video until I call on Thursday and we can look at it together." Felix answered with a thumbs-up picture. Dad answered, "It's only information, love. He's been on television for as long as you've been alive, and he's not the lying sort." Then Dad went offline, and I have been staring at the ceiling since.

Wednesday, Week 8

At breakfast I showed the video to Lina. She watched it twice, eating cereal the whole time, which is how Lina looks at anything serious. Then she put down her spoon and said, "Tess, this man never said any of this."

I asked her how she could be so sure from one minute of video. Lina explained it in plain words, the way she explained edited screenshots to me in the first term. She said that computers can now make a video in which a real person seems to say things he never said, in a voice that sounds like his own. She did not tell me how it is done, and I did not ask. What I needed to know was simply that it can happen, and that it happens to famous people because their faces are everywhere and people trust them.

"Can you see that it's fake?" I asked. Lina shrugged and said, "Sometimes there's something a bit strange, a mouth that moves a little wrong, a voice that's too smooth. Sometimes there's nothing at all, and it keeps getting better. So don't try to win by staring harder at the video, because one day you won't see anything wrong. The check isn't inside the video; it's outside it."

So after my practical class I sat in the library with the video, my diary and Grandma's three questions. Who says so? A video and a page that the video leads to, not the presenter himself in any place I can be sure is really his. How can I check it myself? By going to places that belong to him and to his television channel, using a way of getting there that I choose, and not the button. Who gains if I believe it? Not the presenter, if the video is false, but whoever runs the "platform", if my dad sends them money.

First I looked at the page behind the button, but only from Felix's screenshot of it, not by opening it. It looked like a news article from a big, serious news website, with the same colours and the same kind of headline: "Presenter reveals the secret he never shared on television". Under it there were dozens of grateful comments. It looked exactly like the real thing. A copy of a news page is only a picture of a news page.

Then I did my own checking. I did not search for the words in the advertisement. I went to the website of the television channel, using the address I already knew from entering a quiz competition there last year, and found the presenter's page through the channel's own menu. The page talked about the new series of the quiz and showed a photograph of him holding a very large cake. There was not one word about investing or trading platforms.

On the channel's own news page, a little further down, there was a short notice from some months ago. It said that the faces and voices of several of the channel's presenters had been used in false advertisements for investments, that none of them had ever recommended any investment, and that viewers should not respond and should report such advertisements. I read it twice. I felt relieved and angry at the same time, which is a strange mix.

After that I went to the real news website, typing its name myself, and searched it for the headline. Nothing. No article, no secret, no presenter. Last of all, I looked up the name of the "platform" on the official register, through the website of the official office that supervises banks and investment firms, which I saved on my phone last week, when I checked Adrian's platform. It was not there. Four places, chosen by me, and not one of them agreed with the video.

Thursday Night, Week 8

I called home at seven. Mum answered and said, "Your father has something to tell you," in the voice she uses when somebody has broken a plate. Then Dad came on and, very unusually for Dad, said nothing for a moment.

It turned out that on Tuesday night, before he went offline, Dad had pressed "Find out more". It took him to the news-looking page, and at the bottom of the page there was a form asking for a name and a phone number "so an adviser can send you information". Dad filled it in. He said, "It was only my name and my number, Tess. I didn't give them anything else."

On Wednesday afternoon, while he was at the printing shop, a man called him. The man was very friendly. He knew Dad's first name. He called himself an "account manager" and said that the presenter's "special fund" had only a few places left, that the minimum to begin was small, and that he could help Dad set everything up "right now, while we're talking, it only takes ten minutes". Dad said he would think about it. The man said, kindly but quickly, that the places would be gone by the evening and he would hate for Dad to miss out "after the presenter personally chose to share this".

And then Dad said the thing that made me put my hand over my mouth. He said, "I thought of your rule. The one about waiting a day. I told him I'd call back tomorrow." The man called twice more that evening. Dad did not answer. He had been worrying ever since that he had lost a real chance.

I told him what I had found: the presenter's own page with nothing about money, the channel's notice about false advertisements, the news article that did not exist on the real news website, the platform that was not on the register. Dad was quiet for a long time. Then he said, "I would have trusted that face with the keys to the house."

I said, "Dad, that's exactly why they chose his face. They didn't pick someone nobody trusts. Being trusting isn't a weakness. They planned for good people to trust him." I could hear Mum in the background saying, "Your father wanted to buy me a holiday with it," and then Dad laughing a little, which was the best sound of the week.

We made a short plan together. Dad will not answer that number again, and if someone calls from a new number and mentions the fund, he will end the call without arguing. He will never give bank details, card numbers or codes to anyone who calls him. He gave no money and no bank details, but he will tell his bank anyway, just so they know. He will report the advertisement to the website where Felix saw it, and Mum will help him report what happened to the official offices that take reports of fraud.

Then Felix took the phone. He said he had seen the video between two game videos and thought it looked strange, "because why would a quiz man care about trading?" but Dad had said it might be real, so he sent it to the chat. Felix asked, "So did I do the first question, who says so?" I told him he had done something even better: he had not decided alone, he had asked someone. Felix said, "Obviously," as if it had been his plan from the beginning, and then he hung up to go and play.

Grandma's Fable: The Wolf in the Shepherd's Hat

On a green hill above a slow river there lived a flock of sheep and the shepherd who looked after them. The shepherd wore a wide straw hat with a frayed brim, and the sheep knew that hat better than they knew his face. Every morning it was the first thing they saw coming over the top of the hill. When they saw the hat, they knew that water and fresh grass would follow.

One autumn night a storm blew across the hill. In the morning the shepherd's hat was gone, and he went about his work bareheaded, grumbling about the wind. The hat had not gone far. It had caught on a thorn bush at the bottom of the far hedge, and a wolf found it there.

The wolf turned the hat over in his paws. Then, as the sun went down, he put it on his head and stood by the far hedge, where the grass was long and the light was poor. He called to the flock in a soft, low voice, the way the shepherd called them. "Come, my sheep. There is clover by the hedge tonight, sweeter than any you have tasted. But there is not much of it. Only the first ones will get any."

The young sheep lifted their heads. They saw the wide hat with the frayed brim against the evening sky. "It is the shepherd," they said to one another, and some of them began to trot towards the hedge, hurrying so they would be among the first.

An old ewe with a torn ear did not look at the hedge for very long. She turned the other way and walked, at her usual slow pace, to the stone hut beside the well, where the shepherd sat every evening of his life. The door was open. Inside, by the light of the fire, the shepherd sat without any hat, mending a rope and humming to himself.

The old ewe stood in the doorway and called as loudly as she could. The shepherd looked up, looked past her, and saw his own hat moving by the far hedge. He took his staff and his lantern and ran down the hill, shouting. The wolf dropped the hat and was gone into the dark before the first young sheep had reached the clover, which was not there at all.

The next morning the young sheep crowded around the old ewe. "How did you know it was not him?" they asked. "We saw his hat. We heard his voice." The old ewe chewed her grass for a while. "I did not know," she said. "I only knew where he lives."

Sunday Night, Week 8

Grandma told me the fable on our call tonight, after I had told her about Dad and the video. When she finished, she said nothing else, as usual, and waited for me to find it myself. I said, "The old ewe didn't argue with the hat." Grandma said, "No. Arguing with the hat would have taken all night."

I keep thinking about that. The harder the young sheep looked at the hat, the more it looked like the shepherd's hat, because it was the shepherd's hat. Everything they could see was true, and the thing they could not see was the wolf underneath. That is what Lina meant when she said the check is not inside the video. However good the video is, I only need to go and look in the hut.

I also thought about what the people behind the video want, and what they are afraid of. They want to borrow trust that somebody else spent many years building, because building their own would take too long and nobody would give it to them. And they are afraid of exactly one thing: that someone will walk over to the hut by the well and look inside. That is why the button says "before places run out". A hurry keeps you looking at the hedge.

Before we said goodnight, Grandma told me that as a bookkeeper she never once phoned the number on a letter that used a big firm's name. She looked up the firm herself and phoned the number she found. "That's all the old ewe did," she said. "She didn't take directions from the wolf."

What I Checked This Week

This week I checked a video in which a famous, trusted person seemed to recommend a trading platform. I have learned that today a face and a voice in a video are not proof that the person really said those words. Technology can now copy faces and voices. I do not need to understand how it is done. I only need to remember that it can be done, and that it is used most often with people whom many of us trust.

So I do not try to decide whether the video looks real. Looking closer is not checking. Checking means going to the person's or the organisation's own official pages, which I find myself, by a way I choose: an address I already know, an address from something I trust, or the organisation's own menus, and never the link, button or phone number in the advertisement. In search results, I go past anything marked as an advertisement, because an advertisement can lead to a copy too.

A news page that an advertisement leads to can also be a copy. It can have the right colours and hundreds of happy comments. To check it, I go to the real news website myself and search there for the article. If the article is not on the real website, it does not exist. And whatever a famous person seems to say, I still look up the platform on the official register, through the official office's own website that I find myself.

If someone has already left a name and phone number on a form like Dad did, the calls that follow are part of the same trick, and a friendly voice who knows your first name is not proof of anything. Never give bank details, card numbers or codes to anyone who calls you. If someone says they are from your bank, end the call and phone the bank yourself on the number printed on your card. Report the advertisement where you saw it, and tell the official offices in your country that take reports of fraud.

Last of all, the thing I want to remember most: Dad did not lose anything, and the reason was not that he was clever about technology. He was not. The reason was that he waited a day, and that Felix asked a question in the family chat instead of deciding alone. Waiting and asking gave us the time to check. The face in the video was borrowed. The time to check belonged to us.

Things to Talk About as a Family

This week's diary ends here. A video with a familiar face can feel like a message from someone you know, and that feeling arrives in everyone before any careful thought. There is no shame in it. What helped Tess's family was not that anyone spotted the copy by looking at it. It was that they went to places they chose themselves, and that nobody decided alone.

These questions may help you begin. Which famous people would you trust most if you saw them recommending something, and why do you trust them? If a video of one of them appeared tomorrow, where would you go to check what that person really says, without using any link in the video? And how would each person in your family like to be told, kindly, if the others were worried about something they had seen?

Something small to try as a family: choose one well-known person or organisation that your family likes, and find their own official page together, by a way you already trust, without pressing any advertisement. Then agree on a simple family habit: anyone who sees an exciting money offer with a famous face in it sends it to the family chat with the words "Who says so?" before doing anything else. Like Felix, the one who asks is the one who helps.