How can you prove you are you?

I’m working on my next book which is due for release in spring 2026. The theme is all around how to trust in a deep fake world. As a result, I’ve been talking to a lot of people – technologists, bankers, policymakers, ethicists, hackers (some reformed, some not) – and the conversations is around the one central, slippery idea: digital trust.

That’s the focus of my latest book, which is not about technology – although it is full of tech – it’s a book about people.

The critical thing about trust is about you and me, one-on-one, face-to-face, app-to-app. These days, we often do not see anyone face-to-face but, because we are connected through the network, we trust that you are you. But is the you are projecting, you?

When you look at romance scams, where someone falls in love with someone they’ve never met through Facebook or other social media, you know that it is easy to fake yourself. In fact, the majority of scams are created by social engineering, another form of romance scam if you like. Take Authorised Push Payment fraud (APP for short). An APP Scam is where someone manipulates, deceives or persuades you to transfer funds to someone who is not the person you intended to pay or the payment is not for the purpose intended.

All of these scams are growing day-by-day and it takes me back to themes over the past years of social engineering.

Social engineering is a manipulation technique where attackers exploit human trust and psychology to gain unauthorised access to systems, data, or information by tricking individuals into revealing sensitive information or performing actions that compromise security.

Probably the best example I remember is the story from Tony Sales (reinforced by Jamie Woodruff) of hacking a bank by sitting outside the main office for two months and noticing that every Friday morning at 11:00, a pizza delivery guy arrivied. So, one day, Tony entered the bank at 10:55 on a Friday morning wearing the pizza company’s clothes and, without a question, the bank reception and security let him straight through to the back office where, quite easily, he hacked their system.

I would tell you more but, if I did, I would have to kill you.

In other words, everything today is about people who don’t give a damn about you, trying to get access to your accounts and funds by engineering a relationship with you that could be true or false.

In our digital world, anyone can pretend to be our boss, our colleague, our friend or our partner. Who should you trust digitally when AI can mimic a voice, fake a face, and sign a document better than we can.

We’re heading into a world where your boss might be a bot, your bank might authenticate your iris, and your next scam could come from someone who sounds exactly like your mum. What does trust look like in the 21st century when AI can impersonate anyone. How do we prove we’re human? How do we know who they are? How do you prove that you are you?

There are three themes in this dialogue:

🔒 Identification – Who are you? Who am I?
🔐 Authentication – Can you prove you are you?
🧾 Verification – Who says you're real?

Whether you’re in finance, governance, cybersecurity, or just trying to keep your digital self from being hijacked by a convincing avatar, this matters to you.

I’d love to hear from you—especially if you’re working on these problems, researching them, or just curious. I’m speaking with banks experimenting with zero-trust models, startups building biometric ID systems, and thinkers asking: what does truth even mean anymore?

So, drop me a line. Who should I be talking to next? What questions should we all be asking?

Yours digitally (and, I promise, authentically), Chris