Deepfake celebrity investment scams

How it works

The ad looks like news. A familiar face (a TV presenter, a tech billionaire, a central-bank governor) is being interviewed, and halfway through they “let slip” that ordinary people are quietly getting rich on a new platform. The mouth moves with the words. The voice is right. None of it happened: the face and voice were cloned by AI from real footage, and the “interview” was written by a scammer.

Click, and you land on what looks like a newspaper’s website, with the real paper’s logo, fonts and comment section. The article repeats the story and ends with a sign-up form. Hand over your phone number and a first deposit (usually a round, affordable sum, like €250), and a “personal account manager” calls you within minutes. He is warm, patient and very good at his job. Your dashboard shows your money growing daily. When you try to withdraw, there is a tax to pay first, or a verification fee, or a bigger deposit to “unlock” the next tier. The dashboard was always just a number on a screen. The money left on day one.

The pattern is industrial. Europol warned in 2022 that deepfakes were becoming a standard tool of organised crime. A 2025 Reuters investigation based on Meta’s internal documents estimated that scam and banned-goods ads brought the company roughly 10 % of its 2024 revenue (about 16 billion dollars), a figure Meta disputes. In the UK, the consumer journalist Martin Lewis, whose face is among the most cloned in the country, has spent years fighting ads that use it; the people who made them have never met him.

Example

@daily_report_live, Sponsored “They tried to shut this interview down.” Watch the 4-minute clip before it gets removed: the host of Evening Live explains how he turned 250 into 11,400 in three weeks with NovaTrade AI.

@kriszta_m84, 1h My uncle registered on this last week. A “broker” called him within 10 minutes and he’s already put in 2,000 more. Is this legit??

Notice the three classic parts: a face you trust, a reason to hurry (“before it gets removed”) and a friendly starting amount. The reply shows the real product: the phone call.

Why it works on you

• A face does the trusting for you. We skip checking when someone familiar vouches. That is authority bias, and a cloned face borrows it wholesale. See deepfakes for why the video itself proves nothing anymore.
• The costume is journalism. The lookalike news page is a cloned news site: it carries the credibility of a real outlet with none of the editors.
• The ask is small, then human. €250 is “just to try”. Then a real person spends hours on you. Backing out now feels like letting a friend down, and like admitting the first €250 was a mistake.

What to do

Before you pay: search the platform’s name together with “scam”, and check your financial regulator’s public warning list. Every EU regulator keeps one, and in Hungary the central bank (MNB) publishes it. A real interview lives on the broadcaster’s own site. A real investment never needs you to decide in four minutes. And nobody famous is explaining a secret money machine in a Facebook ad.

If you have already paid: call your bank immediately. Card payments and recent transfers can sometimes be recalled, but every hour counts. Report it to the police and to the platform that ran the ad. Do not pay any “withdrawal fee”, “tax” or “unlocking deposit”: that is the same scam, round two. Expect a call months later from a “recovery agency” that can get your money back for a fee. It cannot.

In a comment section: warn without shaming. “This is a deepfake scam ad; the person in the video never said it”, plus a link, does more than “how can anyone fall for this”. Plenty of careful people do.

Don’t confuse it with

• Real celebrity endorsements exist: they are marked as ads, link to the brand’s own site, and no broker calls you afterwards. The deepfake version promises returns, not products.
• Clumsy parody or satire is not after your card details. The scam always ends in a form.