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.
Fantastic post Peter, well done on the Christie-like detective work.
ReplyDeleteThis annoys me, a great deal - which annoys me even more! I've seen a few of these on Twitter (and indeed even one on Facebook) in the past year. I wonder why, what is the point? None of them seem to be acting to defraud (financially) people, so I wonder why.
Like you say it is a breach of trust – which I abhor. Thankfully @BanffersQC doesn’t seem to have given out any legal advice. Not that it’s a QC’s role anyway.
As for having a life, I’d say you do. It would be the one person (presumably) behind the fake profiles who does not.
The reaction by DM and the subsequent deletion would have been priceless. I hope you savored the moment.
ReplyDeleteIt does matter. On the one hand, you have real QCs such as John Cooper, working his socks off to make the profession more diverse - and on the other, you have the fake Banffers talking utter bollocks about solicitors and non Oxbridge grads - and implying he can make or break a career. It matters because tosspots like him, real or fake, are not gatekeepers.
But people are attracted to glamour and not graft. Hence the following with each increasingly incredible tweet.
I was intrigued to see the interaction between Banffers and Mr Butler. Whilst Mr Butler has not turned out to be my cup of tea, the way in which the twitterverse turned on him because he failed to kowtow to Bannfers was remarkable. I was amazed nobody stood up to call bullshit. I did and was not too surprised by his failure to respond.
I choose to remain anonymous and have my reasons. I therefore am not about compelling others to divulge their details.
But folks, when someone claims to be a Judge, barrister to the stars and gatekeeper of the profession, it would be great to see more lawyers actually being lawyers and calling bullshit - or at least asking questions.
I got the feeling people didn't challenge Banffers on the off chance he might just further their careers. All I'll say to that is:
Get a grip, people.
Well done, Peter. :-)
Well done mate! His worst tweet for me was this morning that said something like "Congratulations to 3 of my clients who make it onto the rich list today".
ReplyDeleteSays it all!
Fantastic post!
ReplyDeleteYou mentioned one of the best legal bloggers, I presume you meant me? :-)
ReplyDeleteI was a bit suspicious when he started claiming that he, allegedly a Revenue silk, had been instructed on "the new Thyssen" or whatever it was he said - why would anyone brief a *revenue* silk on something like that - you might need to take advice on tax consequences or something, but that wasn't what he implied. (Plus I couldn't think of any tax silks who behave anything like that). I thought he was some kind of barrister though, he seemed to know various bits and pieces: I hadn't imagined he could be a complete fake.
ReplyDeleteAfter a while I got bored and unfollowed him: seems from your post he became more extravagant after that.
Thank you for exposing this, and also for making the post which did so such fun to read.
ReplyDeleteI came across his profile via another profile I knew to belong to an actual barrister, so as I had no reason to question it. I believed he was authentic (though thought it was odd he seemed so eager to proclaim he was a QC in his account name).
Hence, I got really upset when he started proclaiming that one needed to have an Oxbridge education in order to be considered at his "leading tax chambers". I also found the general notion that he had that he went to Oxbridge hence was better than everyone else distasteful. Oxbridge is getting an unfairly bad press at the moment in light of tuition fees, and people like him only fan the flames of this resentment.
I have a lot of respect for the majority of what Oxbridge stands for, and the majority of people who go there. However, as a state school educated pupil with 5 As who was rejected by Cambridge, it is a sensitive subject for me and it can be hard not to feel disillusioned by the concept of Oxbridge sometimes. It is after all easier to believe the establishment is at fault, rather than yourself!
My point is, I know Banffers was probably having a laugh, but the comments he was posting could inflame already sensitive people and undo a lot of the work that has gone into diversifying Oxbridge and professions associated with an Oxbridge education, such as law.
What I think is quite funny though, is the fact that all the followers he picked up who applauded the arrogant, entitled comments he was making now look like gullible fools.
So thank you - you have restored any faith I lost in the legal profession and Oxbridge, plus given me an amusing read.
"What I think is quite funny though, is the fact that all the followers he picked up who applauded the arrogant, entitled comments he was making now look like gullible fools".
ReplyDeleteQuite.
Well we were taken in.
ReplyDeleteI suspect he lasted as long as he did because of the throwaway nature of Twitter. On a blog or forum there's enough material in one place to be able to get a feel for someone. On twitter you've got a series of occasional remarks in your timeline that, though they may add up to something clearly rubbish, on their own are enough to slip beneath the radar.
From my, and the other law students' positions, we're sufficiently low down in the system that we assume that if something doesn't add up with what we think we know, it's because we're wrong. That is, in my view, a healthy habit in a junior lawyer. The reason Banffers got away with it is that, like I said, without any particular incentive, we had no reason to go off and verify what was being said.
People say outrageous and humourous stuff on Twitter the whole time. They usually do it behind a pseudonym. You get used to assuming that it’s a joke. My girlfriend does it all the time.
The reason people turned on Mr Butler was not because he was being insufficiently deferential, but because he was pedantic and humourless. It particularly grated with those of us who are not Oxbridge grads (who, like I said, assumed Banffers's remarks to be in jest) to be lectured about the inferiority of Oxbridge from an Oxbridge student.
While I'm sure "lessons will be learned", will it change my approach to Twitter? Probably not. I've got far more out of it than it has from me, and I consider the alternative on insisting on credentials to be far worse than working from a basic position of trust.
Benjamin writes: 'While I'm sure "lessons will be learned", will it change my approach to Twitter? Probably not.'
ReplyDeleteThis is the problem I have with the aftermath of this episode: former followers will gather round a blogpost and its author, but is seems to be more to cover embarrassment rather than learn actual lessons from the experience. Looking from the outside in (having not been part of the conversations with the hoaxers), it is quite unsettling how naive people have been and how hesitant Twitter users were to question the users' claims. Kris's comments above sum my opinion up well.
"Insisting on credentials", as Benjamin suggests, is not the only alternative. More workable is exercising a little more caution with Twitter users' claims; perhaps also a little more emotional distance when interacting with others, especially those we do not (yet) know in person.
I'd like to see former followers of the hoaxers move on and enjoy using Twitter with care, unless you gave the hoaxers your phone or bank card number...