We've all seen the videos where famous names recommend a miracle product or give advice on what we should do with our .
From adventurer revealing a “secret” get-rich-quick investment scheme live on , to money expert announcing an unmissable chance to make a fortune by buying a new cryptocurrency, social media is awash with them.
Most of us scroll on, but still don’t realise that the reels are actually AI-generated fakes which the celebrities had nothing to do with. Some people, however, stop and listen to what they’re saying - and end up scammed out of tens of thousands of pounds.
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Such highly-realistic videos are now circulating in their millions online, as fraudsters use the public’s trust in celebrities, brands and media figures to dupe them into giving away personal information or money.
Worryingly, only one in ten adults in Britain feel confident they can tell what’s real from what’s not - leading to increasing numbers of victims losing huge amounts of cash. An estimated £20million has been lost to scammers impersonating Martin Lewis alone, with devastating financial consequences for those who have been tricked.
Speaking to Alex Beresford - whose own identity has been used by scammers - in a new Tonight investigation on tonight, the Money Saving Expert founder says he has been horrified to hear victims’ stories.
He says: “The most common scams with me in tend to be about Bitcoin trade or something similar, but these are just criminals trying to steal your money. I always remember the story of one woman whose children had died and she was looking after the grandchildren, and she then invested the children’s money in a scam because of me, because she trusted me.
“My whole work and mission is to help consumers improve their finances, to try to prevent financial injustice. To have that perverted, to be used by criminals to take advantage of my reputation is horrendous.”
Marcus Beard, founder of Fenimore Harper, which monitors fake content on social media, says artificial intelligence is allowing scammers to flood the internet with phony videos that are getting more and more difficult to spot.
“They don’t even create them manually, due to the deep fake ,” he says. “They can give it a few instructions about the kind of people they’re targeting, the celebrities they want to use, drop a couple of videos in there, and while they sleep, hundreds of fake adverts can be generated.”
He says social media companies are also letting their users down by failing to remove them. He says: “We did a piece of research about the then Prime Minister . There were over 100 ads being published within a month, and let these all through and a lot of them appeared to have found actual victims. After the election, we looked at , and there were more faked adverts of him than there were authentic ones.”
In one, scammers have altered a video of the PM to make it sound like he’s offering an opportunity to invest in an AI crypto trading scheme, yet using language which many would already have heard in his speeches.
Marcus says :”You have this sort of sandwich effect, bit or real information there, a bit of false information there to really try and sell this lie. It’s really dangerous.”
With well-known soap actors also increasingly finding themselves being impersonated in deep fake scams, both and are now hiring an external company just to help to report and close down fake accounts.
Lisa Riley, who plays Emmerdale’s Mandy Dingle, recently warned fans not to believe a fake advert in which she endorses a ‘no-gym pill’ which has helped her lose weight.
Speaking to the Tonight programme, Lisa said the two photos the scammers used, one of her thinner than the other, are real, but actually they were in the opposite order and she had actually put on weight since the slimmer one was taken. She says: “This is me a few years ago when I had lost more weight. They’ve AI’d the brand next to me, as if that's me and I’ve purchased that.
“And everybody fully believes that they’re going to lose weight, but they’re not. Because there is no such slimming pill at all. And I certainly didn’t take any form of slimming pill. How can we stop this happening?”
And Corrie actor Dan Brocklebank, who plays Billy Mayhew in the soap, says he too has been used by fraudsters to befriend and then rob fans. “It’s happened so many times on with people setting up what they call my personal account and they start to message people. People have been conned out of money, thousands and thousands of pounds.”
To show how easy it is to dupe people, Alex agrees to have Jake Moore, from cybersecurity company ESET, create a fake video of him sending a message to his own father.
Jake puts some footage of Alex, along with a script, through his software, to produce a clip which appears to show the TV presenter asking his dad to take part in a new gameshow with him. When he sends him the footage he is completely convinced that it is his son in the video. “Bloody hell, that’s not you? That is scary,” he says when Alex calls him to tell him.
For many who are duped, however, the consequences are life changing. One is Wayne, a former British soldier who left the army eight years ago to care for his wife and children after she was diagnosed with breast cancer.
No longer earning a salary and looking for other ways to support his family, an online video showing Rod Stewart enthusing about the benefits of investing in Bitcoin caught his attention. He remembers: “I was just sitting there one day on my laptop and the advert came up. It wasn’t a still photo, it was him talking. I thought, well, Rod Stewart’s telling me it’s a good venture, then why not go with it?”
Wayne entered his contact details to express interest, and an hour later he got a call. “He sounded like a really nice chap and explained more about how it works. I told him all about my wife and my problems and he came across as so understanding. I really did believe that this man felt for me and wanted to help me.”
He initially invested £500, but when he saw how his money was growing he paid in more, in amounts of between £10,000 and £20,000. The scammer also cruelly preyed on his grief after his wife sadly lost her battle with cancer, convincing him to invest even more.
Wayne remembers how seven months later “I woke up one morning, looked at my account. And it was the worst thing, everything had gone. I was just sick, I felt sick to the core. You realise it’s happened, and there’s no coming back.”
Wayne had lost £150,000. Four years later, he found a legal firm specialising in helping victims of investment fraud, and after arguing his bank had been negligent, managed to successfully recover all of his money.
Pressure is mounting for the government to take stronger action to clamp down on fake adverts. And Marcus Beard says that with AI software able to spot fake adverts, social media companies can no longer ignore the problem.
He says: “There is technology that wasn’t there a year ago, that can identify deep fakes from a few seconds of that footage. And I think that a lot of these big platforms, in the political moment that we’re in are figuring out where they sit on moderation and content. And in that gap, scams slip through.”
A government spokesperson said: “From this month, social media companies will take more responsibility for stopping fraud on their platforms. This includes proactively tackling false representations and scam adverts which accounts post directly and promote on users’ fees. We have also increased powers that banks have to investigate suspicious payments.”
* Celebrity Scams: Are You At Risk? Tonight airs Thursday, March 12 on ITV1 at 8.30pm
How to spot scam ads online
