For as long as people have uprooted their lives in search of safety, opportunity, or simply a better tomorrow, there have been others waiting to take advantage of them. Immigrants have always been particularly vulnerable to misinformation and scams, and this is not a new problem born of the internet. Max Siegelbaum, cofounder of the immigrant-focused news outlet Documented, remembers a time when scammers used duplicitous advertisements in newspapers and flyers to prey on people desperate for help with the immigration legal system. These analog-era hustlers understood something timeless: when you are far from home, unfamiliar with the laws of a new country, and carrying the weight of family, fear, and hope, you will grasp at any promise of a solution. The tools have changed, but the targeting remains the same. Today, however, those old paper scams have been replaced by something far more pervasive and far harder to police. TikTok has become a dominant source of information for immigrants coming to the United States, whether they are seeking practical advice about the journey itself or trying to navigate the labyrinthine immigration system once they arrive. And into that space, nefarious actors have poured in, using every trick of the algorithm to scam people out of money, sow confusion, and profit from desperation. The stories are often heartbreaking, but they are also deeply instructive, because they reveal a broader crisis in how we know what is true and who we choose to trust.
Social media, as Sam Rabiyah, the Documented reporter who spent months investigating this upside-down world, reminds us, can be a genuinely valuable place for immigrants to share information. A person stuck in a detention center might find a lawyer who actually helps; a new arrival might learn which street vendors are legitimate and which are not; a family might discover the right way to fill out a form. There is real, lifesaving knowledge circulating on these platforms, and it would be wrong to dismiss it all as noise. But at the same time, this is an almost entirely unregulated ecosystem. Legitimate immigration attorneys are having their faces, voices, and names replicated by AI bots, creating clones that are difficult to distinguish from the real professionals. People with no commitment to journalistic integrity can mimic the visual cues, tone, and cadence of established broadcast journalism, telling sensational stories that generate millions of views but do almost nothing to actually inform. The result is a strange and dangerous mirror world where credible information and outright lies are woven together so tightly that even careful readers struggle to separate them. Sam points to a key structural difference with TikTok: unlike most earlier platforms, TikTok is not built around social networks you already have. It does not ask you to connect with people you know or to follow accounts recommended by friends. It is 100 percent algorithm-based and content-based, which means even the limited trust and vetting that social networks traditionally provided is totally absent. A brand-new scammer account can go viral on the same day it is created, simply by tapping into what people desperately want to see. That is a massive change from the days of flyers and newspapers, and it has profound consequences for who gets heard and who gets hurt.
This is perhaps the clearest example yet of what social theorists have called the crisis of authority. It has become harder than ever for ordinary people to tell serious journalism, rigorous research, or a real, qualified attorney apart from accounts that carefully mimic those things. A person can watch a slick video, see an official-looking desk, hear confident legal-sounding language, and have no way of knowing whether the speaker is a credentialed professional, a storyteller with an agenda, or an AI-generated phantom. On the one hand, the democratization of knowledge and expertise is, in many ways, a good thing. It means that marginalized communities, including immigrant communities, no longer have to rely solely on gatekeepers who might ignore them. Anyone can research their rights, learn about immigration policy, and find a community of people with shared experiences. But there are negative externalities to this democratization, and they are enormous. The same openness that allows a helpful immigrant to share a tip with others also allows a scammer to impersonate that immigrant, or a lawyer, or a reporter. The crisis of authority is not just an abstract academic concern. It is a lived, daily problem for people who need accurate information to make life-or-death decisions. When you cannot tell the difference between a legitimate attorney and an AI clone, when you cannot tell whether a viral news story is real or fabricated, the entire system of trust begins to crack. And once trust is lost, people are left with the worst of both worlds: they are skeptical of real experts and vulnerable to fake ones.
There is an intellectual framework for this, too, in the ideas of the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, who wrote about the growing disconnection between reality and the images of reality. Baudrillard observed that at one point in history, fidelity to the original was considered a staple of artistic and representational production. An image was supposed to reflect something real, to stand in for an actual thing. But gradually, he argued, the image began to mask and distort that reality. Then it went further, eventually disconnecting from reality entirely, entering a stage he called the hyperreal. In the hyperreal, simulations no longer point back to anything true; they become their own kind of reality, one that can feel more compelling and more engaging than the actual world. Documented’s reporting shows that immigrants looking for information online are already living in something like an immigration simulation. It is not a faithful reproduction of what is true, because so many of the videos, accounts, and AI-generated lawyers are not real. But it is also not yet totally divorced from the underlying reality, because real professionals and real journalists are still doing real work, and their contributions still shine through the noise. That does not make it any less confusing for someone searching for answers. And it makes one wonder: at what point will AI scammers move on from copying real attorneys and begin creating an entire alternate universe of fully artificial information and legal advice? If that happens, we will have reached the immigration hyperreal, a place where every source looks legitimate, every law is a fabrication, and the very idea of a trustworthy expert becomes a memory of a world that no longer exists.
Even when the problem is not as nefarious as cloning someone’s likeness, there is real harm being done. Reputable immigration attorneys often put significant time and effort into creating educational videos, explaining complicated laws, and offering guidance to people who cannot afford a consultation. These videos are genuine acts of public service, and they also help attorneys build their reputations and their practices. But because their content can be copied and reposted to nameless accounts with no credit, no context, and no accountability, those attorneys do not always reap the benefits of their work. Their expertise is harvested by others who may use it to build trust for themselves, or to launder misinformation, or simply to attract eyes to a platform full of scams. The original creators are left with the strange experience of seeing their own faces and words attached to accounts they have never seen and know nothing about. As Sam noted, one effect of all this may be a return to, or a renewed romanticization of, the analog. In an era where every online interaction could be with a bot, there is something deeply appealing about sitting across a desk from a real person, or at least hearing a human voice on the telephone. In-person and over-the-phone legal consultations may become more valuable precisely because they are difficult to fake. The physical world still offers something that the digital world cannot: a body, a paper trail, a person who can be held responsible. It is not a perfect solution, and it is not accessible to everyone, but it is a reminder that human connection remains the strongest defense against the loneliness and uncertainty that make so many people vulnerable in the first place.
Stories like this, about the media ecosystem that immigrants themselves are living in and navigating, rarely make it to the national news outlets. The mainstream media tends to focus on the politics of immigration, not on the everyday, practical, and often bizarre experiences of immigrants trying to figure out what is true online. But because Documented is focused specifically on the immigrant community in New York City, it has a unique window into what immigrants actually care about most. The team at Documented, including Max and Sam, spends its time talking to real people, building tools, and following the threads that other reporters might ignore. That is why their current series, Decoding Immigrant TikTok, is so important. It does not just warn people about scams; it explains how the scams work, who is behind them, and what the rest of us can do to avoid getting caught. The investigation includes stories about TikTok lawyers facing their AI clones, about news influencers cashing in on the criminal immigrant narrative, and about the technical side of how bots spread through the platform. The team even built an open-source tool that allows the public to do their own investigative work on TikTok, which is especially useful for people who, like me, are not deeply active on the platform. I am grateful that Max and Sam joined the conversation, and I encourage everyone to check out the full series, the tracker, and the newsletter. The internet is not going away, and neither are scams. But if we can learn to see through them, to understand the machinery of deception, and to hold onto the human relationships that ground us in reality, then perhaps we can keep the hyperreal at bay.