Yasuo Nakajima was 50 years old and led an ordinary life in Japan. But on Twitter, he was someone else: a young motorcyclist with an easy smile who posted photos making peace signs beside his motorcycle.
For more than two years, using the @azusagakuyuki account, he built that persona with FaceApp, the app that lets you change your face, gender, and age with a filter. Before creating her, his posts barely received 10 ‘likes’. With her, he surpassed a thousand and gained nearly 20,000 followers who never suspected a thing.
Until something didn’t add up. One user noticed the reflection of a man in the rearview mirror in one of the photos. Others noticed an arm with too much hair to belong to the girl in the picture. The program ‘Getsuyou Kara Yofukashi’ investigated the case and confronted him on camera. Nakajima took off his helmet in front of all of Japan and confessed; no one wants to see a middle-aged man on a motorcycle. What followed was even more unexpected than the deception. Instead of losing them, he gained even more followers.
