There is an undeniable amount of trust involved. The exchanges are quick and I've often said it's hard to fake being something or someone you're not. Just occasionally, however, something happens that leaves a bitter taste in the mouth.
New Friends
A while back two characters popped up on my timeline: @BanffersQC and @TheBlondeBoyf. They seemed to know people I spoke to; I followed them. They were both "anonymous" profiles: so no face pictures. That's not that unusual: people like to protect their real identities for all sorts of reasons.
@BanffersQC said he was a Tax Silk and used the avatar above. A pretty senior lawyer: in fact so senior, he claimed to have been made up to the Queen's Bench Division as a judge from October. The Blonde [sic] Boyf was his boyfriend, and later they announced their engagement over Twitter and he became @BlondFiance. They were joined by a third account @Boyf_Mummy who was apparently the boyfriend's mother.
There were some pretty pretentious tweets from the pair, which became more colourful and suspicious over time. The fiance (who only changed the spelling of blond(e) when he was told it inflects in English) claimed to be a 28 6'2 blond male model: an old Etonian, a French aristocrat, a Cambridge graduate, ex-Morgan Stanley, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and now a fashion writer. Alarm bells began to ring. His mother according to her bio had "moved to Monaco" so she could "wear her diamonds".
Followers from the Legal World
Banffers himself never tweeted about anything substantive to do with the law. He clearly did have some knowledge or experience of the legal world (or possibly a rapid ability to google or wikipedia information) - he was aware of the case I worked on for 4 years in Bermuda. To be fair, that was in the Evening Standard too however. I did wonder though at his frequent use of the Grocer's apostrophe ("the Thyssen's" was the first I picked up on).
Banffers picked up more and more followers from the legal world. QCs are rare on Twitter and one of the great things about the medium is its democracy. It doesn't matter who you are: if you're interesting and have something to say you have the ability to chat with people you'd never meet in real life. Accordingly lawyers, law students, pupil barristers followed him and he followed back.
Suspicion Creeps In
I started becoming really suspicious though as tales of their "fabulous" life became more and more extreme. My best friend separately also had doubts from the outset. Banffers was tweeting from his chauffeur driven car about Question Time (again, nothing original, substantive or intelligent to say of note) as he was being driven to Tory HQ on local election night. He promised to "tweet through the night" on the "legal aspects of the referendum". When asked what tax aspects there were to the subject, he went silent.
The sheer level of pretension was breathtaking. The Fiance was not happy with his Maserati, so instantly got a test drive in a £157K Mercedes SLS, which was available immediately to him. Banffers claimed on 5 May that "he loved how Harrods greeted the Fiance by Twitter as he walked through the door". A quick glance at the timeline showed the Fiance had mentioned he was going there on 2 May and all Harrods did was pick up the mention with a generic welcome. The pair seemed to go through life drinking champagne, melting down their Amex cards, visiting Oman, complaining about 25 minute waits on the phone to Coutts, and generally leading the lives of multi-multi millionaires.
The Fiance changed his profile to this: would the partner of a future judge *really* want this as his avatar?
All the time they used similar syntax in their tweets, made the same repeated grammatical errors, the same misuse of the apostrophe, wrong capitalisation, and the same level of "showing off" (there's no better description). I've met plenty of QCs in my career. Would any even vaguely fit this description? Absolutely not.
Last Night: Lady Thatcher and Being Gay
I got annoyed last night. Banffers seemed to have become intoxicated with the number of new followers he was picking up, tweeting about Lady Thatcher. He claimed to know her personally (of course), said she was in great health and still drank frequently. I have it on reasonably good authority she isn't and doesn't. Unfashionably for a Lefty, I have a great deal of respect for selected measure she carried out when in in office. The things he said though were offensive in the extreme and designed to get the back up of anyone not right of Atilla the Hun.
He also tweeted about being gay, being Catholic and it was full of self-loathing and very unhealthy to my mind. This really got my back up.
He became more and more extreme and rude to anyone who disagreed. We are back in the realm of last year's homophobic, fake magistrate on Twitter: when you become outspoken, you attract attention. He was horribly rude to a guy in Glasgow and told him he needed to learn how to spell (he added the hashtag #education) - having just written "countries" instead of "country's" himself. He'd picked up nearly 1000 followers and was clearly loving it.
Rumbled
Today he tweeted that for Europe Day he would be "drinking champagne and beating the nearest Lib Dem to death". I thought it was time to smoke him out. I set up a profile @rumbled1. I used a set of fake Louis Vuitton handbags as my avatar: it was only fitting given the Fiance's interest in fashion :)
I told him quite a few people were on to him (true) and he should have some dignity and delete his profile or he would be exposed. He reacted by DM, like a rabbit caught in the headlights. A couple of people saw the conversation and chipped in. He first blocked us, then made his tweets private, then all 3 profiles disappeared. I'm told you cannot delete profiles, so I don't know if he changed the names or what happened - but if you look now you'll see "This user does not exist".
Could he be real? On the basis of the evidence so far, I was about to say possibly. I'll hopefully hear tomorrow from both Peterhouse Cambridge and the Royal Society of Arts to see if they have a record of the aristocratic name and title the Fiance used in emails to me. Whilst it's also true that deleting the profiles is not conclusive - the email I've received from him whilst typing this almost certainly is:
"Peter,
You have, in all probability, done us a great service. Thank you and we're sorry.
Yours ever,
Banffers, TheBlondBoyf, BoyfMummy"
Do I need to get a Life?
Now so what, you may say. Why did I waste so much energy on this? Why does it matter?
Actually this has hardly taken that long to do. The @rumbled1 profile took 5 minutes to do and within 30 minutes it had done its job. I do have a life, honest! And does it matter? Yes: it does in lots of ways to me. I have a wonderful circle of people I talk to on Twitter. I consider many as real as my "real life" friends. I've met up with some of them. I talk almost daily. We know what's going on in each other's lives. We're open and there is an inherent trust about Twitter. These people (or this person, who knows?) came into our circle and, if he/ they are fakes as I strongly suspect, violated our trust. As one put it, having spoken to him for weeks "it leaves a bitter taste in the mouth".
But it goes further. A very good friend of mine is an infant school teacher. She has parents who ask her advice on Twitter. If she were a fake, this could be dangerous. Perhaps they shouldn't be so trusting, but the whole medium operates on that basis, like it or not. Law students followed Banffers because he was a QC. Law partners and one the best legal bloggers around also did so. It's not fraudulent in the sense that no one lost out financially (I assume!) but if highly intelligent people can be taken in, the risk of abuse of confidence is obviously there for anyone less able to discern and cut through what is real.
We do trust, and that's a great thing about Twitter - but watch out how much. If someone I'd been speaking to for 6 months asked me for money, what would I do? I'm not going to fall for any old confidence trickster.... or so I'd like to think.
Finally, I like to think I'm not a nasty person. I haven't done this for fun - there's one more person (after that email I'm now sure it is one person) who matters in this. It's the holder of those accounts. He's been playing out a fantasy world for weeks and whilst I'm not trained in emotional issues, I can see he probably needs some help. It must have taken vast amounts of energy for him to put together all this and from his email it does look like he was under some form of intoxication or addiction to it. I hope he is genuinely pleased this has ended and I wish him all the best.
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