The promo was too good to be true. At the beginning of January, users of Facebook, Instagram and TikTok saw a strange advertising video appear on their news feed. Taylor Swift appeared there in a black dress, with a cheerful expression, in the middle of a luxuriously decorated living room. After greeting her audience according to the codes in force on social networks, the American singer launched into a long monologue with advertising accents. ” Hello everyone ! You probably know me for my songs, but I also have a huge passion for cooking », she confided in a strangely monotonous voice, before announcing that she was the bearer of an incredible offer: the possibility of acquiring, through her, a complete set of kitchen sets for free. The latter, with a market value equivalent to several hundred euros, mainly included casseroles and cooking dishes stamped “Le Creuset”. The only condition for sending this culinary treasure, the merits of which Taylor Swift then set about praising (“a casserole dish made to last, made with the best materials”): please pay shipping costs, around ten dollars…
For the gullible souls who wanted to take advantage of the bargain (all they had to do was click on a link to place an order), the trap closed immediately: the money paid ended up in the pockets of cyber-crooks, and the merchandise , as expected, was never delivered. Because the commercial collaboration between the pop star, named personality of the year by the magazine Time in 2023, and the famous French kitchenware company, which quickly denied the operation, was, in reality, purely fictitious. As for the video broadcast, it was a deepfake: a trickery process which allows, using artificial intelligence, to manipulate the digital image of a person to make them say… almost everything and anything.
The anecdote had at least this merit: to inform us about the increasingly sophisticated and ingenious methods used by online scammers. But it also questions the nature of the bait chosen. To fool the pigeons, why use simple cast iron casseroles rather than state-of-the-art smartphones or the promise of an imaginary inheritance, as is usually customary in this type of online scam?
Objects of desire
This is because in the space of a few years our grandmothers’ pots, long considered obsolete, even a bit dusty, have become real objects of desire. Cooking containers that are now available at high prices (between 250 and 600 euros, depending on the size, from Le Creuset or Staub, the main players on the market) and which no longer have much to do with these old casserole dishes from the last century, “volcanic orange” color, which we sometimes find in flea markets.
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