A finance employee in Hong Kong suspected the email was a fraud. So he did what five centuries of good advice told him to do: he verified. He joined a video call and looked his colleagues in the face. The faces were right. The voices were right. Fifteen transfers later, twenty-five and a half million dollars were gone, and every person on that call except him had been synthetic.

For five hundred years, civilisation had two cures for deception: look closer, and gather more sources. This episode follows both into the present and watches them fail. The detection science puts human performance on the best fakes at chance, and training barely moves it. The corroborating sources you check are now manufacturable by the same hand, at a rate of hundreds of new fake newsrooms a month. A street magician impersonated the President of the United States  ...