David McCandless

By day, Ed is a mild-mannered retiree. By night, he is an online superhero.

Ed Lake seems like the average American retiree. He lives alone, works out at the gym three times a week, and loves films, oldies and modern classics. His neighbours like him and he is a valued member of the local bridge club.

Except at night, when the world winds down, and his Minneapolis street is dark, he changes. He ceases to be mild-mannered Ed Lake. Instead he becomes an on-line superhero, crusading for Truth, Justice, and Nudity. He is simply known as…The Fake Detective.

His arch enemies? A loose sect of ‘fakers’ who use Photoshop to decapitate celebrities and starlets and digitally glue their heads on the bodies of pornstars and topless models. And then use the globe-spanning web to pass them off as real life photos

Some would consider this kind of activity harmless. Indeed, some of the results are laughable. Who would believe that Patrick Stewart would actually comprise himself with the entire Enterprise crew? Or that Nicole Kidman would allow herself to be photographed topless, slick with baby oil, half in, half out of a swimming pool? But some are stunning. With software tools now available to create light, film grain and shadows on photos, highly-skilled Fakers can create images so sophisticated even trained experts can not detect them.

Except the Fake Detective, of course.

“I started this,” The Fake Detective says, “because it annoyed me that I was being fooled by fakes. Actresses you respected appearing in poses you couldn’t imagine.”

It all began back in 1996. One evening, Ed came across some images of X-Files star Gillian Anderson on a far-flung website. He was shocked, appalled. “They looked real but I couldn’t believe that Ms Anderson would pose for such pictures.” On closer examination, he discovered they were fakes and that the same original head shot had been pasted onto three different bodies. His own artistic talents helped him spot the forgery. “I used to paint bar-room nudes,” he says.

He decided to expose the fake for everyone to see, pointing out the cracks, calling it a “case file” and posting it under the nickname, The Fake Detective. He even wrote a few comments and gave the image a school mark, in this case B+.

“CASE # 01 - This fake of Gillian Anderson shows considerable expertise with digital editing, particularly on the hand, nose, eyes and eyebrows. The Fake Detective remains puzzled why the arm was so heavily edited.”

A legend was born. Within a few months, he had thirty cases under his belt. He had smashed the fake nude skeletons in the closets of Dolly Parton, Hilary Clinton, Heather Locklear, and Jennifer Anniston. He had appeared on TV and honorific web-sites in his name were popping up all over the globe.

Nude celebrities, however, are big business and it wasn’t long before the FD came into conflict with the Establishment - the on-line porn industry. Many salacious subscription websites drum up business with fakes celebrity nudes. “I got some nasty e-mails,” he admits. “They were pretty upset with me. They accused me of ‘stalking’ their sites.”

Outside the Internet, nude celebs are even bigger. Men’s magazines like FHM in the UK thrive on the promise of well-lit exposes of desirable TV babes and even print media has fallen for the Internet fakers.

Celebrity Sleuth magazine in the US - a ragmag of paparazzi photos and bikini shots - were convinced they were printing genuine nude pictures of Gates McFadden, the doctor in Star Trek: The Next Generation. The FD would not stand for it.

“They insisted to me that the pictures were real, even telling me they had talked to the producer and director of the movie. I e-mailed them over and over again, telling them they were wrong. As it turned out, the pictures were of a B-movie actress.”

Another fake busted.

In a year of undercover sleuthing, Ed Lake has only ‘broken cover’ once to appear on FOX TV News in Los Angeles. He was branded a “World Expert On Digital Image Manipulation” and demonstrated live how easy it was to access fakes, alongside an interview with Sandra Bullock.

“She basically said she found it offensive and disgusting that people could do this her,” he recalls. “and I agreed.”

Many people saw him on the show and his reputation and notoriety spread. Fame became a big motivator for the hours he spent on-line. He still gets a flattering 25 e-mails a day from all over the world. However, he insists he has a higher purpose. In a lifestyle straight out of the pages of a Raymond Chandler novel, the FD sees himself protecting innocent damsels and pursues truth through the meaner back streets of the Internet.

One hundred and fifty cases have not made him complacent. “I’ve been duped,” he concedes reluctantly. “Some I thought were fake turned out to be real. I can admit when I’m wrong.”

He’s written a book about his experiences as the Fake Detective and is hoping a publisher will pick it up. In the meantime he continues to chip away at the endless stream of nudes which pours through the Internet every day.

A monumental task. The fakers are rallying. They want their gruesome works of body art to be seen and believed but, like urban myths and disaster jokes, it’s impossible to pinpoint exactly who originated the fake. Which twisted mind spend hours re-aligning a pixel suture along Gillian Anderson’s neck. And no doubt someone, somewhere, is laughing out loud when the newsgroups scream that they’ve found the first and only topless Dolly Parton shot - sporting his girlfriend’s breasts.

Whoever they are, and where-ever they may be, they’d better be good.

The Fake Detective is watching.

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Originally published in The Daily Telegraph, Mar 1997