Stephen Mills

A guy in Ohio robbed four banks wearing a $650 silicone mask, and the cops arrested the wrong man. Six of seven bank employees picked the innocent guy out of a lineup. His own mother looked at the security photo and thought it was her son. The robber was Conrad Zdzierak, a white 30-year-old from Poland. The mask was a young Black man's face called "The Player," which he ordered from a little special effects shop in LA called SPFX Masks. The man police arrested sat in jail until Zdzierak's girlfriend found the mask and a pile of cash in his hotel room and called it in. When detectives opened Zdzierak's safe, they found a second mask from the same shop, an old white guy called "The Elder." That same year, a young man wore that exact model onto an Air Canada flight from Hong Kong to Vancouver. Gate staff noticed his hands looked way too young for his face and let him board anyway. He only got caught because he took the mask off in the airplane bathroom and walked back out as a guy in his early twenties. Those were the amateurs, though. Over in France, a crew used the same trick on Skype calls and pulled in €55 million. Gilbert Chikli's people built a replica of the French defense minister's office, flags and a portrait of the president on the wall and everything, and one of them sat behind the desk in a custom mask of the minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian. They'd call rich people and ask for secret money to pay ransoms for French hostages. They tried more than 150 people and only three paid, which still worked out to about €18 million each. The Aga Khan alone wired €20 million over five transfers. Police later found photos of a Prince Albert of Monaco mask on one of their phones, so it looks like they had a sequel planned. What tripped them up with Senegal's president had nothing to do with the face. Macky Sall actually knew Le Drian, and the guy on the call kept calling him "vous," the formal version of "you." Friends in France say "tu." The reason these masks work is kind of clever once you see it. A full-head mask has holes for the eyes and mouth, so the blinking, the eye movement and the lips forming words all come from a real person. In the video you can see the silicone runs all the way down past the collarbones, so there isn't even a line at the chin to catch. Pretty much everything on that face that moves is real. Researchers at York and Kyoto tested this in 2019. They showed people two photos side by side, told them flat out that one was a mask, and people still picked wrong one time in five. When they only got half a second to look, they missed one in three. The researchers think real life is worse, since most people don't even know masks this good exist. They're also way easier to get now. In 2024 a burglar in Shanghai broke into four apartments disguised as an old man, and Chinese sellers told reporters they don't ask buyers for any ID. And all of this happened before most people had even heard the word deepfake.