In 2013, when I was writing a biweekly business and legal column for the Globe and Mail, one of my columns went totally viral. It was called “Don’t Get Taken by Cheap “Canada Goose” Parkas (like I was).” It told my story of how I mistakenly trusted a very authentic looking Canada Goose vendor on the internet, which promised to deliver genuine Canada Goose jackets for less than a quarter of the retail sale price. Like an idiot, I gave them my credit card number, after which time, my brain decided to turn on, and I opened up the Canada Goose website. I learned to my horror that Canada Goose didn’t allow any online sales, and that I was scammed. So, I wrote about it and exposed the names of the scammers. As late as 2018, my editor told me that it was still one of the most accessed small-business columns at the Globe.
As we all know (or should know) by now, scammers are everywhere. I don’t answer the phone anymore unless I recognize the number. Calls from India, China and obscure US states, which I have no connection with, are routinely ignored. If people really want me, they can leave a message or email me. I never open up links in emails unless I know the sender and I’m expecting the email, and I change my passwords regularly. When I want to buy something online, I’m very careful with the vendor to make sure it’s not a scam site. I use social media to share my articles and my exotic world travels, but I am careful what I share.
I have heard reports where someone purports to have kidnapped a family member and seeks a ransom for their release. But in reality, they have accessed an excerpt of the victim’s voice and used AI and deep fake technology to say whatever the scammers want them to say. Or, instead of a kidnap scenario, the deep fake/AI voice contacts a family member by phone to say they’re in trouble and they need money wired to them immediately. So it’s probably a good idea to have a “safe word” among family members which the AI/deep fake “avatar” will not know, so that you can verify whether or not the call is truly a scam.
A recent report called “Disruptions on the Horizon” prepared by Policy Horizons Canada identified a number of disruptions that could have a significant impact on Canadians in the next decade. The 10 most likely disruptions include an ecosystem collapse, a loss of biodiversity, people cannot afford to live on their own, downward social mobility being the norm, emergency response collapse and artificial intelligence. But at the very top of the list of most likely disruptions are that people are not able to tell what is true and what is not.
Misinformation, particularly misinformation that sponsors or promotes conspiracy theories fascinates me to no end. Whether it’s a story that COVID-19 was a hoax, or that the horse dewormer Ivermectin, zinc or bleach was a treatment for COVID, that the World Economic Forum is comprised of evil Bond villains, that Clint Eastwood returned all of his Academy Awards as a protest to “Woke Hollywood,” or that Donald Trump’s recent conviction of a criminal offence was a scam, disinformation is not restricted to buying Canada Goose jackets on the internet but has now become a pervasive cancer on civil society where citizens don’t know what is true, so they suspect that everything is untrue. Or, even worse, they believe what is untrue because it is consistent with their political or religious convictions. If it sounds true, it must be true. Some call this “truthiness,” which has been defined as belief “that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination or facts.”
As Carl Sagan said, “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us.”