Let’s talk about the dead man whose face is still selling crypto.
John Laws died late last year. Radio legend. Decades of trust built the old way — voice, repetition, showing up every morning. Last week Australia’s corporate regulator published its scam numbers, and there he was, on the list of the most impersonated Australians in the country. A dead man, still endorsing unlicensed crypto platforms. Still “warning” people about a secret way to get rich.
The regulator is ASIC. Over the past year it removed a record 19,400 scams — up 182% on the year before. Phishing takedowns up 279%. Fake investment platforms up 151%. The most impersonated faces: the Prime Minister, the Opposition Leader, Gina Rinehart, the Reserve Bank governor, and a finance journalist named Alan Kohler, who starred in a completely fabricated interview with the RBA governor about a trading platform called Boulder Sparhaven. The interview never happened. The platform is not licensed to do anything, and the government’s own website tells people to be wary of it.
Here’s the mechanism, because it matters. It’s not one fake image. It’s a web. Scammers build a fake news footprint — articles, reviews, branding, ads — then funnel you through a fake article with a fake celebrity quote, then hit you with scripted phone calls and small “profits” to earn your trust before the real ask. Every layer is generated. Every layer is cheap.
Now here’s what the coverage mostly misses. Everyone reads the number — 19,400 — and assumes enforcement is winning. It is not. That number is the scoreboard of a losing game. The regulator removed 19,400 scams and the rate went up 182%. You cannot takedown your way out of a problem where the production cost is zero, the distribution is free, and the ads are approved by the platform’s own algorithm. Whack-a-mole is not a strategy when the mole is a printer.
Kohler knows. He reported the fakes to Meta, and it was like whack-a-mole — they kept coming back. Then he said the line that should be carved into something permanent: “It’s taken a lifetime to build trust, and it’s so easily lost.” The former NAB chief economist, Alan Oster, told the press he was getting ten messages a week from people alerting him to fake endorsements, and he felt terrible, because people would lose money and blame him. He didn’t do anything wrong. His face was stolen.
That’s the part people are missing. This was never just a financial crime. It’s a trust crime. Every fake endorsement spends down the credibility of a real person — a journalist, a central banker, a prime minister. The scammer doesn’t care about Kohler’s reputation. He spends it like counterfeit cash and walks away. The person who loses money is one kind of victim. The person whose face was stolen is another. And the dead man on the list is the warning nobody wants to say out loud: if they’ll put a dead broadcaster’s face on a fake article to sell crypto, no living person’s identity is safe — and no amount of “report this ad” is going to fix it.
Notice who didn’t answer the question. ASIC’s chair says social media companies have a lot to answer for. Meta says rising takedowns just mean better detection. But when asked how much money the platforms made from the scam ads their own systems approved, Meta did not respond. That silence is the business model.
So what do you do? You don’t become a forensic expert. That’s a dead end — ASIC’s own chair says you can look very carefully and still not be able to tell if it’s a fake. Vigilance does not scale. The only answer is provenance: proof of origin attached to media at the moment it’s made, so a face, a voice, an endorsement carries a verifiable record of where it came from. The fake Kohler interview should have been impossible to publish as if it were real news footage. Not harder to detect. Impossible.
Until that exists, the machine keeps minting dead men.
Here’s what I’d tell anyone listening. If a famous face is promising you a guaranteed return, assume it’s a fake. If it looks too polished to be fake, assume it’s a better fake. And if you ever wonder whether this touches you personally — remember John Laws. He didn’t get a say in how his face was used. Neither will you, the day the machine decides your face is worth more than your consent.
You’ve got this. Not because the world is safe. Because now you know the game is being played.