I pity the fraudster who has to pretend to be me
About a year ago, I appeared on Watchdog to discuss identity fraud. A researcher for the programme had managed to become a ‘friend’ of mine via Facebook and, as a result, now had access to personal information that would enable her to impersonate me. For instance, she could apply for a credit card in my name and run up huge debts that I would be liable for. Was I not horrified to discover just how vulnerable I was to this type of crime?
‘Actually, no,’ I said. ‘The thing is, I want people to start going round impersonating me. Having people pretend to be you is a sign that you’ve arrived in our society.’ I was being provocative, obviously. With over 58 million Britons to choose from — eight million of whom are on Facebook — why would a fraudster bother to impersonate me? Surely, he or she would be better off choosing someone with no public profile at all just in case the person they were attempting to fool happened to be familiar with my unique appearance? (‘A peeled plover’s egg dipped in celery salt,’ according to my cousin Consuelo.) Well, it has finally happened. According to last week’s Mail on Sunday (‘How to Steal Watches and Alienate Toby’), a young man has been posing as me in an attempt to pilfer luxury watches. Apparently, he has been contacting the PRs for various upmarket watch manufacturers and claiming he needs to road-test their merchandise for an article he is writing for Tatler. So far, he has managed to obtain two Versace watches.
Should I be flattered? On one level, yes. If the fraudster was posing as me in person, that would be a little insulting since he would be assuming the PRs in question had no idea what I looked like. But his modus operandi is to call them up and arrange to have the watches biked over to a bogus address in north London. His reason for using my name, presumably, is that he thinks the PRs will recognise the name ‘Toby Young’ and be more likely to do his bidding — they will not bother to verify his story because they will have heard of me. In fact, all the PRs he has tried to dupe in this way have called Tatler to check, the sole exception being the girl who works for Versace.
On another level, though, it is not very flattering. After all, he is assuming the PRs will be anxious to co-operate with me — that I am the sort of journalist who can be relied upon to write puff pieces in return for expensive baubles — when I like to pride myself on being considered highly untrustworthy by such people. Until recently, for instance, Freud Communications had me on a blacklist, refusing to allow me to attend any of their events. Has my reputation sunk so low that PRs now consider me a safe bet?
I may be reading too much into this. According to Ahlya Fateh, the managing editor of Tatler, I am not the only writer this fraudster has impersonated. Before using my name he tried to pass himself off as Anthony Powell, the English author. It seems unlikely that the PR girls he was trying to fool would be familiar with A Dance to the Music of Time, Powell’s 12-volume magnum opus, but if they were they would probably know that he died eight years ago.
If I was him I would stop wasting my time on petty fraud and enrol on a journalism course. He will soon discover that in return for a few words of praise in a glossy magazine he will be allowed to keep all sorts of luxury goods, not just watches. Indeed, if he rises high enough up the food chain, he will not even have to write anything in order to get his hands on these trinkets. At Vanity Fair, where I worked for two and a half years, I once came across a screwed-up ball of paper outside the offices of the magazine’s fashion director. It turned out to be a letter from the Diamond Information Center politely asking when the journalist in question was planning to run something on the diamond solitaire necklace it had sent her. More recently, the fashion director of another New York glossy magazine had her wrist slapped when she was caught trying to sell a couture coat she had been sent by Chanel on eBay. The floor was $150,000.
Toby Young is associate editor of The Spectator.
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