Unknown account poses as BBC journalist

A warn­ing is cir­cu­lat­ing in the Belaru­sian infor­ma­tion space about a sus­pi­cious account whose author presents him­self as a BBC jour­nal­ist, though his con­nec­tion to the British broad­cast­er has not been con­firmed.

Screen­shot of the fake account

Accord­ing to avail­able infor­ma­tion, the account is con­tact­ing for­mer polit­i­cal pris­on­ers and offer­ing them inter­views; among those said to have already agreed to a con­ver­sa­tion is polit­i­cal activist and for­mer polit­i­cal pris­on­er Mikalai Dzi­adok. Fol­low­ing the inter­view, the accoun­t’s author report­ed­ly pro­pos­es “fur­ther com­mu­ni­ca­tion on his own terms.”

In his pro­file he describes him­self as a free­lancer, but there is no pub­licly avail­able evi­dence of his work for BBC, and the pho­to­graph used in the pro­file may, accord­ing to a reverse image search, belong to anoth­er per­son or have been gen­er­at­ed by AI.

The warn­ing was sent direct­ly to the BBC, where the sit­u­a­tion was described as “very seri­ous and trou­bling.”