scam
Scammers count on haste, not on a second opinion
A Zurich professor who cures obesity "in 27 days"? The man is real, the video is not. Why good fakes now borrow real experts, and why thirty seconds of asking is time well spent.
Scammers count on haste. They don't count on a second opinion in thirty seconds.
A video recently found its way to me in which a Zurich professor recommended a simple method that would cure obesity "in 27 days" (a degree of precision rarely heard from serious medicine), and it looked roughly as trustworthy as such videos are designed to look. Instead of clicking, I passed the link to a chatbot with one plain question: how likely is it that this is genuine?
The answer came in two parts, and only the second was really interesting. The man exists. Prof. Philipp Gerber is indeed a specialist in obesity and metabolism at the University Hospital Zurich. And on his official page, the hospital explicitly warns about manipulated, AI-generated videos of him.
That is the genuinely uncomfortable part of the story. Good fakes no longer invent experts, they borrow real ones (without asking, naturally), and anyone who only checks whether the person exists is all the more likely to fall for it.
The same question has already spared me some trouble with dubious trading offers, and since I run these checks more often than I would like, I built myself an app for it: Link Insights for iPhone, iPad and Mac. You don't even have to open it. Share the link from Safari, YouTube or any other app through the regular share menu, pick the type of answer, among them a plausibility check that looks for exactly this kind of contradiction, and the result appears right there.
To be fair: the result is an assessment, not a verdict, and a well-made fake can fool an AI as well. But it buys you the one thing scammers like least, which is a pause. Where money and health are concerned, those thirty seconds are fairly well invested.