How Deepfake Celebrity Ads Sell Fake Trading Sites

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The deepfake ad is the front door, not the theft. The money is taken later, by phone, WhatsApp and a fake trading dashboard.
• Most documented cases open with a small deposit of around 250 dollars or pounds, then escalate through fake profits, "release fees" and pressure to borrow.
• The faces change by country: Martin Lewis in the UK, Elon Musk almost everywhere, Mukesh Ambani in India, Yusaku Maezawa in Japan, Andrew Forrest in Australia.
• No genuine public figure launches a trading platform through a paid social ad that links to a "secret" news story. Treat that combination as fraud by default.

$7.2B

Reported US losses to crypto investment fraud in 2025, the largest single loss category in the FBI's data.

FBI IC3 2025 Internet Crime Report

$1.1B

Lost in 2025 to investment scams that began on social media, more than half of all social media scam losses.

FTC, April 2026

~$16B

Revenue Meta's own 2024 documents projected from scam and banned-goods ads, about 10% of the total. Meta calls the estimate overly inclusive.

Reuters, November 2025

£200M+

Estimated yearly losses by UK victims to fraudulent online ads. Over half of UK adults say they have seen one.

Ofcom, July 2026

The hook ad

A paid post on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube or Google shows a famous face "revealing" a money platform, often framed as a TV segment. The Sunak ads used faked BBC footage. The first Martin Lewis clip copied the caption style of ITV's This Morning.

The cloak

Before the scam page loads, a filtering service checks who is visiting. Moderators, bots and people outside the target country see a harmless page. Infoblox documented one group running its own cloaking service and mixing in ordinary shopping ads to dodge enforcement.

The fake news article

A cloned BBC, CNN, CTV or local news page tells a dramatic story: an interview "went wrong", a celebrity leaked a secret, a regulator tried to shut it down. Security firm CTM360 counted more than 17,000 of these spoofed news sites.

The sign-up form

Name, email, phone number. This is the real conversion. Your details become a lead that is passed to a call centre.

The "account manager" call

Someone rings, often within hours. Australia's Scamwatch says the caller typically asks for about $250 to open the account. Beauchamp's first deposit was $248.

The dashboard and the squeeze

The platform shows rising profits. Then come screen-sharing apps, WhatsApp chats, top-up requests, nudges to take out loans and, at the end, "fees", "taxes" or "commissions" to release money that never existed.

CASE 1 · JULY 2023 · UNITED KINGDOM

The "Quantum AI" clip that opened the deepfake era

Face: Martin Lewis, with Elon Musk  |  Channel: Facebook, Instagram  |  Loss: not disclosed

A video showed "Lewis" at his desk claiming Musk had already put more than $3 billion into a new project offering British citizens rare investment opportunities. Lewis flagged it on 6 July 2023 as the first deepfake scam he had seen using his own face and voice, and Meta said it removed the original. He had already taken Facebook to court in 2018 over fake ads using his name, a case that settled with Facebook donating £3 million to Citizens Advice.

CASE 2 · AUGUST 2023 · BRIGHTON, UK

Des Healey and the deposit-to-withdraw trap  (Victims Journey)

Face: Martin Lewis and Elon Musk  |  Channel: Facebook  |  Loss: about £75,000

After leaving his details on a fake bitcoin ad, Healey was told to move £5,000, his savings, into a Revolut account, from which it was moved on as an "investment". To get that £5,000 back, he was told to add £10,000 more. The scammer bonded with him over Manchester United and family life, then pushed him into loans totalling £70,000 from four banks. He was left with debt he says he still cannot clear.

CASE 3 · LATE 2023 · UNITED STATES

Steve Beauchamp's $690,000 "Musk" investment

Face: Elon Musk (real interview, cloned voice)  |  Channel: online video  |  Loss: more than $690,000

The 82-year-old retiree opened an account with a firm called Magna-FX for $248, then drained his retirement account over several weeks. At one point an agent used software to take control of his computer and shuffle funds. To withdraw, he was asked for a $3,500 admin fee and a $3,500 commission, then $20,000 more to release about $200,000. After that, the website, phone line and email addresses vanished. Asked about the video, he said that if he had to pick Musk out of a line-up, "that's him."

CASE 4 · DECEMBER 2023 TO JANUARY 2024 · UNITED KINGDOM

143 deepfake Rishi Sunak ads and a fake BBC page

Face: Rishi Sunak and a BBC presenter  |  Channel: Facebook  |  Reach: up to 400,000 people

Research firm Fenimore Harper found 143 ads running between 8 December 2023 and 8 January 2024, funded with up to £12,929 from 23 countries including the US, Turkey, Malaysia and the Philippines. One faked BBC newsreader Sarah Campbell announcing that Musk had built a stock market app the government was testing. The ads linked to a spoofed BBC News page selling the scheme. Meta said most of the ads were disabled before the report was published.

CASE 5 · 2022 TO 2025 · TBILISI, GEORGIA

The "Scam Empire" call centre behind the faces

Faces: Martin Lewis, Zoe Ball, Ben Fogle  |  Channel: Facebook and Google ads  |  Loss: $35.3 million

A 1.9-terabyte leak obtained by Swedish broadcaster SVT and shared with OCCRP, The Guardian and around 30 partners exposed a firm called A.K. Group. About 85 agents in Tbilisi, who called themselves "skameri" (Georgian slang for scammers), took roughly $35 million from more than 6,000 people in the UK, Europe and Canada from May 2022 onward, with UK victims hit hardest. One victim said his losses began with a video of Ben Fogle "trading". The full leak covered at least 32,000 victims and $275 million across two networks. Georgian prosecutors opened a criminal case after publication.

CASE 6 · APRIL TO JUNE 2024 · MUMBAI, INDIA

A doctor, a deepfake Ambani reel and 16 bank accounts

Face: Mukesh Ambani  |  Channel: Instagram reel  |  Loss: Rs 7.1 lakh

A 54-year-old Ayurveda doctor from Andheri saw a reel on 15 April in which a fake Ambani praised the "Rajiv Sharma Trade Group" and its BCF Academy. A web search showed claimed offices in London and at Bandra Kurla Complex, which reassured her. Between 28 May and 10 June she paid Rs 7.1 lakh into 16 different bank accounts. Her dashboard showed a profit of around Rs 30,000, yet every withdrawal attempt failed.

CASE 7 · SEPTEMBER 2026 · NORTHERN IRELAND

£250,000 lost through an ad, WhatsApp and borrowed money

Face: unnamed financial celebrity  |  Channel: social ad, then WhatsApp  |  Loss: £250,000

The Police Service of Northern Ireland said a person in the Ards and North Down area saw an AI-generated video of a well-known financial figure, was then handled over WhatsApp, persuaded to open several online accounts, give remote access to their computer and borrow money to keep investing. BBC News NI reported seeing similar ads using Martin Lewis, Peter Jones and Steven Bartlett. Police stressed that an apparent celebrity endorsement is never proof an investment is genuine.

Borrowed trust

The faces are picked for credibility on money, not fame. Surrey's Police and Crime Commissioner has called Lewis the high-profile figure fraudsters impersonate most often.

A tiny first step

A 250 deposit feels like a test, not a commitment. A climbing dashboard and sometimes one small successful withdrawal do the rest of the persuading.

Ad systems that pay

Reuters reported Meta needed 95% certainty before auto-banning a suspected fraud advertiser and charged some suspects higher ad rates instead. Meta disputes how the documents were characterised.

What has improved

• Meta brought back facial recognition in October 2024 to match faces in suspicious ads against public figures' profiles. It later said nearly 500,000 public figures were covered and user reports of celeb-bait ads fell 22%.
• Meta says it removed 159 million scam ads in 2025, 92% of them before any user reported them.
• Ofcom's draft fraudulent advertising code (July 2026) proposes nearly 40 measures, including banning accounts that post scam ads and checking that investment advertisers are authorised.

What still falls short

• Reuters reported Meta estimated about $7 billion a year from its "higher-risk" scam ad category alone.
• On 10 August 2026, a California federal judge found Meta failed to preserve evidence, including final versions of scam ads, in Andrew Forrest's lawsuit, calling it gross negligence.
• Ofcom's code will not be final before mid-2027 and still needs parliamentary approval.

Call your bank first

Use the number on your card. In the UK, dialling 159 connects to most major banks. Transfers can sometimes be frozen if you move within hours.

Cut off access

Uninstall any screen-sharing app, stop all contact, and change banking and email passwords from a different device.

Report it officially

UK: Report Fraud (reportfraud.police.uk, 0300 123 2040), which replaced Action Fraud. US: ic3.gov and reportfraud.ftc.gov. Australia: Scamwatch. India: cybercrime.gov.in or helpline 1930.

Ignore "recovery" offers

People promising to retrieve your money for an upfront fee are usually the same networks running a second scam.

After weeks of clicking through these ads, reading the cloned news pages and following each case to its end, our desk came away with one firm conclusion: you cannot out-watch a deepfake. Several of the clips we reviewed held up on a phone screen better than we expected, and the people who lost money in these cases were not careless. A doctor, a retiree, a kitchen fitter. Each one was walked carefully from a familiar face to a form, from a form to a friendly caller, and from that caller to a loan.

The good news is that the funnel is far easier to spot than the face. The fake BBC address, the 250 deposit, the WhatsApp move, the screen-sharing request and the fee to withdraw show up in case after case, country after country. None of them needs any technical skill to recognise.