whoami
Mike Wright. I'm an independent researcher in Canada. I study deceptive media and coordinated inauthentic behaviour: fake reviews, testimonial farms, borrowed faces, AI-made personas, and the networks of accounts that make something look more trusted than it is.
By day I run an IT practice for small businesses. The rest of the time I take apart the operations that prey on them. That's less of a career change than it sounds. Twenty years of auditing what a claim actually says left me with a habit I can't turn off: when a vendor, a brand or a shiny new tool makes a promise, I want to see the machinery underneath before I believe a word.
Background
I came to this through security. I'm an ethical hacker and a Certified Network Pentester (CNPen), and I still do authorised testing. The habits carry over: work from evidence, get permission before you touch anything, and write it up so someone else can check it.
Why
Small businesses and ordinary people are the target of choice, because they're too busy to look. Behind every fake voice is infrastructure that can't fake its own records. That's where I work.