Karol Strasburger is kidnapped by masked attackers on the outskirts of Wrocław. His injured bodyguard reports to the police and goes to the scene of the kidnapping with a patrol. Meanwhile, the actor manages to escape and reach the nearest police station. As he testifies, the criminals took him to their hideout, tied him up and ordered him to read a strange text to the camera…
Their actions seem absurd, but the perpetrators knew exactly what they were doing, and the kidnapping was just an additional element of their perfidious practice, which brought them considerable profits and huge losses for the victims.
“Today’s events were a shock for me, but also a lesson,” says the main character of these events afterward.
Fortunately, this is only a script for one episode “Policewomen and policemen“, although unfortunately it is not a complete fiction, because Karol Strasburger himself, playing himself in this story, fell victim to a similar practice more than once.
“In my private life, recently, someone has been impersonating me many times – under my name, under my face – by setting up false websites and sending false information as me. And it so happened, interestingly and very nicely, that the series ‘Policewomen and Policemen’ dealt with this topic and I play myself in this series – myself, who is involved in these types of problems,” said the actor on the set of the series in Wrocław.
Star “First Love” and “Familiada”, which has been involved in raising awareness of similar threats for a long time, reminds that with the development of new technologies and the transfer of larger and larger areas of our lives to the Internet, crimes committed online are becoming more and more common, often using artificial intelligence, which allows for undetectable manipulation of images and sounds in the form of the so-called deepfakes.
“We have come to times when news, especially the Internet and media, is quite often untrue. It does great harm, especially to young people, so playing myself, somewhat privately involved in this matter, while at the same time taking on such a film character, is something really very important, cool, and I perceive it as a form of a more social message (…), a warning for people who will watch it, to really pay attention to it and not to be fooled by fraudsters. They are fooled by the fact that someone is sending something to them, because it is not necessarily that person, because someone manipulated it. So I treat it as an element of a social message, as I said. And the fact that it happened to me is so close to me because I have experienced such a situation many times in my private life.
Karol Strasburger’s partners on the set included, among others: Mariusz Węgłowski, Paweł Kowalczyk and Bogusław Kudłek, who played the roles of policemen in the series, spoke very highly of their cooperation, as well as with the entire crew.
“I met with nice company, with a very nice film crew, who also approach not only me but this problem in general with such respect and understanding,” he summed up at the end.
The latest episodes of the series “Policemen and Policemen” are broadcast from Monday to Friday at 7:00 p.m. on Czwórka.