Andrew Forrest, an Australian billionaire has begun a legal investigation of the social network Facebook for allowing advertisement of crypto scams on their platform, The Guardian confirms. The ad is said to have featured his image without his permission while advertising a crypto scam.
There have been various other reports of such fake advertisements circulating the social media platform, featuring other famous names, such as Kate Winslet, Hugh Jackman, Nicole Kidman, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and other celebrities.
The scam adverts claim that the celebrities have made huge profits from crypto investments on their exchange, and usually throw in a piece of information about how shocked the banks were when they looked at their returns.
Upon following the advert’s link, one is redirected to a fake article where they invite you to invest in a crypto scheme. After registration, one is first asked to invest a small sum of money that gradually increases with every further investment, leading many unsuspecting victims to bankruptcy.
A global investigation on the matter has been conducted by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. However, as it seems rather easy to report fake adverts, in reality, it is extremely difficult to track the origins of these scams. The sheer number of them is also alarming. In the UK alone, 731,000 celebrity scam websites were discovered and removed between April and December 2020, as confirmed by BBC.
It might seem appealing to invest money when they promise you “guaranteed success.” However, always remember the very simple rule of recognizing scams: They usually are just too good to be true.