the arbiters of what art is or isn t and we believe in a diversity of opinions. but as i lead, you know, insult and explaining what patreon was at the very beginning we also want us to save community so i think for us there are certain types of behaviours that are very explicit. actually, i thought initially when you re talking about fraud it was committing fraud against your community. sometimes, you know, telling them to pay you in order to get financial independence or something like that. but for us in particular there are certain things around hate speech all around bullying or doxxing when you expose someone s address that are just lines that do not support any sort of safe community. i know you ve recently gave evidence to a select committee enquiry at westminster about this and about influences? what did they want to know? it s really great that the government is taking more interest in influences on social media in general and this was an enquiry into influencer culture, and t
copyrighted to luke josef. but it s tankz singing. all of these clues put together makes us believe that tankz may be a student from london by the name of luke joseph. so, having put all this close together, what did you then do with the results of the investigation? are police, for example, now pursuing some of these fraud influencers? in terms of the police, i m not sure what they re doing. that s definitely one for them. speaking to me a little earlier about panorama hunting the social media fraudsters which is available at now on iplayer. 0nline fraud is big at the moment. there is the fraud we have just heard about, in locations in the shooting in plymouth in the last week or so about radicalisation online. what are the social media companies doing about this just now? they re focused on content moderation and this - is a perennial problem because for as long i as they have been social medial platforms that have been issues to content consumption. youtube, tiktok, instagram,
it can take a very big toll on your mental health as well so i think opportunities for creators to, kind of, regain that connection with their audience in a real direct way is something that s going to be really beneficial going forward. we have talked about making money via social media but of course, for every well intentioned musician, there is someone perhaps with slightly darker motives. i have been speaking to cath, who is a reporterfrom the bbc panorama programme who has been investigating a new kind of criminal, the fraud influencer. fraud influence is someone who has a large following but the difference is the engaging content they are putting out there is fraud. they are promoting this glamorous, criminal lifestyle and sometimes even using social media to sell criminal services, fraudulent services. now, you looked into an influencer called tankz. how many followers does
he have online and what of those followers seeing? he has over 150,000 followers across different platforms. tiktok, instagram, snapchat, twitter, and he posts these day in the life videos, day in the life of tankz, day in the life of a clicker, a slang word for fraud and you can see him glamorising fraud, wielding large amounts of cash and multiple bank cards and on into them he is selling manuals, methods he calls them, and how you can commit fraud. you bought some of these manuals, these guides, to have a look at what was on offer, so what did you find? i can t go into too much detail because we don t want to teach people how to commit fraud! fair enough. but it came in the form of a cloud storage link, and you click on it and find
to some 16 and 17 year olds. they said they were seeing the same thing, people glamorising fraud, selling methods on how you can commit fraud, and that s how i came across it and it turned out i m not the only young person who has seen this kind of thing. and in the documentary, we see you exchanging messages, even phone calls with some of the fraudsters. did that mean using burner phones, fake social media profiles to make sure that you were protecting yourself? yes, so there were times when i was walking around with several burner phones with burner sim cards and multiple fake identities online and fake profiles. the fraudsters remain anonymous and we were doing the same thing to protect ourselves. i know you tracked down the person who seemed to have been tankz and his own social media posts seem to have let you there. what did you spot there?