By Harry Mottram: If something sounds too good to be true it probably is. Members of the public have fallen for fake adverts supposedly highlighting how BBC celebrities and saying how they’ve made fortunes from investment schemes. Ben Fogle, Zoe Ball and Jeremy Clarkson are some of the names used by scammers to endorse their AI-generated scams often supposedly written by Martin Lewis.
This week the Guardian ran a story on Ben Fogle who has been used by scammers to make out he was recommending the public to invest in fake investment schemes. All of the so-called articles of a fake image of the BBC website to give them credibility suggested the celebrities endorsed the schemes and pointed those interested to a link.
Using Artificial Intelligence to even create videos which appeared to be the real celebrities endorsing the scams the fraudsters were able to con thousands of people out of potentially millions of pounds.
One question raised is how did FaceBook allow these adverts to appear – and they still pop up from time to time. It is fairly simple. The scammers book a legitimate investment advert and once it is accepted they change the url to the link and the graphics and then repeat the advert by copying and pasting them over and over again.
Des Healey, a kitchen fitter from Brighton told BBC Radio 5 Live he was conned out £76,000 last year after believing Martin Lewis was recommending the investment advertised online. Another victim was Margaret (not her real name) from Buckinghamshire who was conned out of £250 when she clicked on a link in a fake advert on Instagram. This time it was a fictitious ITV article in which Robert Peston (or rather, a scammer pretending it was him), chats about an investment opportunity he had come across – generated by AI. In another case a retired doctor fell for a fake advert and lost £50,000 in the belief the money would make massive returns after believing Ben Fogle was behind the scheme.
Writing for The Guardian this week Simon Goodley, Zoe Wood, Pamela Duncan and Michael Goodier exposed a Georgian crime group who has stolen around £30million pounds from the public who believed they were making sound investments. They wrote: “Deepfake videos and fictional news reports featuring the money expert Martin Lewis, the radio DJ Zoe Ball and the adventurer Ben Fogle were used to promote fraudulent cryptocurrency and other investment schemes. The scammers are understood to have still been contacting victims in recent weeks. UK citizens were the hardest hit, accounting for a third – about £9m – of the money taken.”
A new law is coming in next year – it’s part of the online safety bill which will clamp down on online crime – but fraud is as old as humanity and so scammers will no doubt find new ways to con people out of their cash.
Other victims have fallen for similar scams in which they initially give up personal details such as mobile phone numbers, email addresses and even bank details – which are then sold on to other scammers who use them to target more victims. Victims are often the retired, not tech savvy and are conned by the voices and videos of famous and familiar and trusted TV stars.
Checkaco’s advice is never be drawn into a conversation online or on the phone about investments and never click on links which suggest get rich quick schemes. As mentioned before – if something sounds too good to be true it probably is.
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