Revealed: How Online Scammers Conned Savers Out of £28m Using Fake Celebrity Adverts

An organised crime network has scammed thousands of savers from the UK, mainland Europe and Canada out of £28m by placing fake celebrity advertisements on Facebook and Google that the UK government promised to ban three years ago.

- Simon Goodley Zoe Wood Pamela Duncan Michael Goodier

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 bogus cryptocurrency and investment schemes.

The scammers, who are based in the former Soviet state of Georgia, are understood to have been contacting victims within the past few weeks.

UK citizens were the hardest hit, accounting for about a third – or £9m – of the losses.

The fraud was exposed when data from a scam call centre was leaked to SVT, Sweden’s national broadcaster. It shared the files with the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, the Guardian and other international reporting partners.

The UK government has introduced laws aimed at protecting children and adults online. However, while the Online Safety Act has been passed into law and scam posts could soon prompt fines, the sections relating to fraudulent ads are not expected to become active until next year.

Cases of authorised push payment fraud – where a victim is tricked into sending money directly from their account – rose by 12% to more than 230,000 in 2023, according to UK Finance. However, the trade body said the total sums lost had fallen.

The data leak, which contains more than 1m call records – including long exchanges with victims who lost significant sums – gives rare insight into how the scammers created havoc.

It also raises fresh questions about the efforts made by governments, banks and technology companies to combat this type of fraud.