Is Facebook’s verification scheme a scam?

Is Facebook’s scheme, announced over the weekend, to encourage its three billion users to pay $12 (£10) a month to have their accounts verified really just a form of corporate extortion?

I ask only because last year someone – I strongly suspect a deranged Novak Djokovic fan – took the time to create a fake Facebook profile featuring me. The photo that accompanies the profile, which is named ‘Damian Damian’, is certainly of me, although Boris Johnson, who I was standing next to when it was taken, has been cropped out.

Onto my forehead has been superimposed a fetching pair of devil’s horns and posts include ‘I’m a delusional little boy’, ‘I’m an evil journalist with a secret agenda’ and, most charmingly of all, ‘my obsession won, I didn’t order the medicine, I can’t remember the last time I took it’.

I’m fingering a Djokovic fan as the culprit because the profile appeared very shortly after I incurred the wrath of thousands of them on Twitter by posting footage