Those were the words my grandmother greeted me with when I arrived for Thanksgiving in 2017. Clearly, right up until she saw my face, she had feared for my safety. The strange thing was that I didn't understand why.
Thanksgiving has always been a special time for my family, a time to come together, share food, and strengthen the bonds between us. My grandparents lived in Florida, and I traveled far and wide, residing and working in locations as far afield as China and Brazil. I made a big effort to call them and check in every week or so, but between those conversations, they often couldn't pinpoint where I was at any given moment. Inevitably, we sometimes didn't have time to share all that was going on in our lives, but we knew that, come what may, we'd have a chance to catch up in person in November.
Whatever else I was doing, wherever else I was, Thanksgiving was sacred. Everything else was put on hold while I flew into Florida and celebrated with them. My grandfather loved his food, and the traditional Thanksgiving menu was his absolute favorite, which added to the sense of occasion. Shortly after he passed, as we sorted through his belongings, we discovered that the only tangible mementos from his time serving in the Korean War were menus from Thanksgiving and other notable dinners they'd served in the canteen. Even when the dangers of bombs and bullets were ever present, he found comfort, normalcy, and satisfaction in a good meal.
I was used to being greeted enthusiastically when I stepped over the threshold of my grandparents' home. On this occasion, however, my grandma's welcoming hug was tinged with anxiety. She looked me in the face, as if to check that I was really there, really okay, and seemed distinctly relieved to register that I was. Naturally, I was happy to reunite with her and my grandfather after several months, but I was also confused. I didn't know why she seemed so concerned.
It was only after my grandparents ushered me inside and I had the chance to ask them what was happening that my grandmother's reaction made sense to me. As it turned out, they had good reason to fear that something had happened to me. This is the story they told me.
A couple of months earlier, they had received a phone call from someone who sounded exactly like me. They knew that I had been traveling a lot that week but couldn't be sure exactly where I was or what I was doing, so when the person on the other end of the phone, in a voice that sounded broken and scared, said they were far from home, in trouble, and in need of help, it sounded plausible. Okay, the number wasn't familiar, but I often called from unfamiliar overseas numbers. That wasn't enough to dismiss the call. The speaker, talking to my grandmother while my grandfather listened in on speaker, went on to explain that I was in Asia. Something had gone wrong, said the voice, and I needed my grandma to wire me some money immediately. Horrified, and willing to do almost anything to protect her grandson, she almost fell for it.
As you've probably guessed, the voice on the other end of the line didn't belong to me. It was a synthetic impersonation, probably built from publicly available audio clips. The imitation wasn't perfect — the line was crackly and the quality mediocre — but that, too, made sense in context. According to the story woven by the fraudsters, I was stuck in a dangerous backwater, struggling to make contact. If all of that had been true, I might well have been calling from a poor-quality line.
The hoaxer had collected enough personal information to make a passable attempt at convincing my grandma that they were really me. By factoring in an appeal to her empathy and creating a sense of urgency, they almost did enough to override her skepticism and persuade her to wire them money. If not for one crucial error, this might be a very different story: With my grandfather listening in, they referred to him as "grandfather," not by the nickname I habitually used for him.
That was enough to trigger his well-honed instincts and convince my grandfather to pump the brakes. Without interrupting the conversation, he began signaling to my grandmother that he suspected a scam and encouraged her to tell the voice on the other end of the phone that she would call them back rather than taking any irreversible action. Naturally, the scammer fought hard against this turn of events, emphasizing the urgency of the situation and trying to give my grandparents details of where to send money, but they stood firm. Between them, they agreed to get off the phone, step back from the high-pressure tactics, and discuss their course of action calmly.
Inevitably, my grandma was quite shaken by the intrusion. She feared that she was letting me down in my hour of greatest need and couldn't bear the thought of later finding out that it really had been me on the phone, and she had refused to help. The rational part of her mind told her that she had done the right thing, but a small, doubtful voice gnawed at her, telling her that she had made a mistake and should have done as the voice on the phone requested.
The aftershocks of that call rumbled on for some time, affecting her emotional equilibrium. The next time I called, she was happy to hear from me, and doubtless relieved that I seemed fine, but too embarrassed to talk to me directly about the experience. It wasn't until I walked through the door on Thanksgiving, clearly in good health, that she completely allowed herself to believe that the call had been a scam. That's when we discussed what had happened and she admitted how much it still troubled her.
I'm grateful that my grandparents had the presence of mind to resist the pull of the scammers and refuse to part with what would have been a significant amount of money for them. I'm grateful that I saw them soon after and had the opportunity to reassure them. Nonetheless, they lost something important that day. Their sense of trust and their confidence in the world around them took a significant hit. They felt less safe, less able to distinguish truth from lies. They discovered a gap in their map of reality.
This is a book about that gap and how it's affecting us all. It's also a book about how we close the gap and restore a sense of trust in a world where it's increasingly difficult to tell the difference between what's real and what isn't.
A Technology with Infinite Potential
With the possible exception of a few uncontacted tribes deep in the Peruvian Amazon, it seems as though everyone is talking about artificial intelligence (AI). That's probably not surprising. The technology is advancing so rapidly that by the time this book is published, parts of it may already be out of date.
As with any technological revolution, the development of AI is reshaping our understanding of what's possible. Large language models (LLMs), sounding disarmingly human, are capable of responding to almost any query we can throw at them. Image generators can create lifelike facsimiles of almost any scenario the human mind can conceive of. Coding AIs can generate websites in seconds. Many tasks that previously would have taken days, weeks, or even months can be ticked off over a coffee break.
This is exciting. I'm a devout technologist, and I'm fascinated by both what we can already do with AI tools and what we will soon be able to do. It's also alarming. As with any new technology, AI reveals new vulnerabilities. My grandma's confusion over whether she was genuinely talking to me is one example, but it would be a mistake to imagine that only older generations or those less comfortable with emerging trends risk being misled.
AI is blurring the line between what is real and unreal for us all, and I'd be willing to bet that, however smart you are, you've had moments of not knowing for certain whether an image, video, or voice was a faithful recording of something that really happened or whether it was artificially generated. There's no shame in that. As the sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." As I write these words in 2026, AI is rocketing forward so quickly that some of the things it can accomplish do indeed seem like magic.
As you'll see, this affects us on many levels. In a personal context, scams like the one that almost trapped my grandparents are becoming both more widespread and more sophisticated. Even if you're so well attuned that you can avoid falling victim to them, there are likely people in your life who may be at risk. And it would be a grave error to become complacent. Many operations don't rely on persuading you, the end user, to send them money. They harvest publicly available information, which they then use to target customer support agents, convincing them to reset your password or transfer security measures to a phone number they control. By traditional security standards, you could be hit without ever putting a foot wrong.
This leads us to the impact of fraudulent uses of AI in the enterprise. If you're reading this book, I'm guessing there's a high chance you're a business leader and that at least some component of your organization is online or operates remotely across traditional, physical boundaries — all of which means you probably have sensitive client information you need to protect. Failing to do so would be a disaster, both for customer trust and for your bottom line. Yet can you really be confident that your systems are safe from AI-powered fraud? Over the course of the book, we'll discuss several high-profile incidents, many of which took place at high-profile organizations with cutting-edge security protocols but which nonetheless found themselves vulnerable.
Finally, we'll address the societal implications of AI's influence. While we all need to engage with the changing world that we find ourselves in on both a personal and a professional level, we will ultimately need a shared agreement on how we regulate the use of this new technology. What constitutes acceptable use? Who owns an AI representation of your face? How do we navigate public arenas such as courtrooms, politics, and entertainment? We'll examine crucial edge cases and ask what they tell us, as well as examine existing efforts to regulate AI technologies and assess which ones show us a likely way forward.
Ultimately, the biggest problem posed by AI is not a problem of technology; it's a problem of trust. AI makes it shockingly easy to convincingly imitate someone else, and that has ripple effects for almost every aspect of who and how we trust. If I can call a customer service line and pretend to be you, or North Korean agents can successfully impersonate legitimate job applicants or employees, the certainties on which we build our reality begin to wobble. When we don't know how to establish trust, our organizations and institutions start to degrade and become dysfunctional. Solving the problem of how to restore trust, therefore, must be a priority for us all.
An Epidemic of Deepfakes
Without really noticing it, we've become used to seeing deepfakes pop up in our social media feeds. Maybe you remember the picture of the pope in a puffer jacket or Taylor Swift apparently stealing an ice cream from an African child. These images are uncannily realistic but don't pose any obvious dangers. You've probably also been caught out by deepfake images or videos, at least momentarily. That's not surprising — many are so hard to distinguish from reality that they require a double take.
Many deepfakes seem like harmless pranks. In June 2025, influencer Mia Zelu posted images of herself enjoying the Wimbledon tennis tournament, apparently hobnobbing with a selection of high-status celebrities. Zelu, however, doesn't exist. The images — and her entire account — were generated by AI.
Others have the potential to manipulate public opinion, posing risks for democracy. You've probably seen warped deepfakes of politicians: A video of Nancy Pelosi was famously altered to make her appear intoxicated, and — on the other side of the aisle — a deepfake of Marco Rubio was used to call and text people, purportedly in his official capacity as secretary of state. As of 2026, the office of the president was routinely posting synthetic media without disclosing it as such.
This public deception is the context in which most people think of deepfakes: images and videos designed to present a reality that doesn't exist, for the purposes of swaying opinion or simply giving people on the internet a good laugh.
The distortion of reality can create significant issues, but most of us have incorporated a degree of skepticism about images and videos that seem unlikely. We're learning to take a step back and think about whether what we're seeing and hearing is real. We understand that the internet is a relatively low-trust environment and adjust our expectations accordingly.
We'll discuss several examples of public deepfakes in this book, some benign, some questionable. They represent test cases as we collectively figure out how to relate to a new reality in which reality itself is malleable.
We'll also discuss another type of deepfake, one that gets much less publicity and yet which poses a much greater danger. I'm talking here about private impersonation. This type of deepfake is used not to impersonate or mock public figures but to target companies and individuals, usually for financial gain. They are designed with the explicit intention of gaining access to systems or people, and their creators are as organized and entrepreneurial as any small business owner. For most of us, they represent a far more credible threat than public deception, yet they are far more poorly understood. They are the primary subject of this book.
We all understand that identity can be faked and that identity theft exists. Most of us, however, are still catching up to how easy it is to pretend to be someone else, how damaging these incidents are both materially and to our sense of trust, and how large the holes are in our existing security systems. Unless you've had to respond to the impersonation of someone on your team, or you've supported a loved one attacked by a scammer, the concept can feel largely abstract. If you have, you'll know how devastating it can be.
In a world where technology is so good that it can outwit our safeguards and even convince the people we love, identity can become a weapon. This is a book about understanding the various fronts on which we're already being attacked and how to fight back.
