Crypto scams How to guard against investment fraud

Millions of pounds are lost each week to fraudsters offering too-good-to-be-true opportunities. Zoe Wood reveals how they reel you in

- Zoe Wood

Martin Lewis and Elon Musk don't appear to have much in common. One is a trusted British personal finance guru; the other is the world's richest person and a Donald Trump ally. However, their wisdom and wealth respectively make them a powerful weapon for scammers.

"I have the dubious honour of being used in more scam ads than anyone else in the UK, even though I never do any advertising," Lewis tells Guardian Money.

"If you add in Elon Musk, between us we are the huge majority of scam ads," he adds, referring to data compiled by Action Fraud, the UK's centre for collating allegations of cybercrime.

The MoneySavingExpert.com founder's status as a force for good means that when he offers advice, people take notice. As a result, fraudsters capitalise on this to send what are "shortcut psychological messages", he says. "I am there to portray 'trusted financial source', Elon Musk has 'huge wealth'."

This week, a Guardian investigation into a $35m (£27m) fraud shone a spotlight on the tactics that investment scammers use to cheat Britons out of millions of pounds every week.

The fraud was exposed by a huge leak of data to the Swedish public broadcaster SVT, which shared the files with international media partners. Out of about 2,000 victims persuaded to part with the largest sums, 652 were from the UK.

So how can you, or your loved ones, avoid joining their ranks?

When it comes to investment scams, fake cryptocurrency tops the list, but scammers dangle too-good-to-be-true opportunities to buy other things such as gold, wine, property, carbon credits and land banking, where land is divided into smaller plots to sell to investors.

The latest data from the banking trade body UK Finance showed investment scammers cheated Britons out of £56m in the first six months of 2024. However, the true total will be much higher, as many victims do not report the crime.