How Scammers Pose as Crypto Coaches, Influencers, and Politicians Online to Lure People With Easy Cash and Scare Tactics
Investment scams are now a common feature of the online fraud landscape, especially for customers operating online. In the U.S. in 2024, investment-related scams became the fourth most common scam registered by the Federal Trade Commission, with associated losses jumping from $4.6 billion in 2023 to $5.7 billion in 2024.
Through our ATLAS intelligence reporting, Graphika regularly detects, tracks, and helps disrupt a wide array of scams on multiple online platforms. Working with industry partners at Meta, we’ve joined a campaign to raise public awareness about online scams. This report focuses on financial investment scams online.
Our findings are not exhaustive but rather a set of case studies illustrating how these types of scams attempt to engage, deceive, and defraud people of their money. We’ve selected these examples based on a combination of key attributes, including their relevance as investment scams, prevalence across internet platforms, and notable tactics, techniques, and procedures.
Key Findings
- As highlighted in our previous shopping and romance scams reports, investment scams also occur on an international scale. We observed multilingual accounts sometimes administered from Nigeria targeting a wide array of users, from people in financial distress in the Philippines and South Africa to older users in the U.S. Scammers demonstrate a reasonable understanding of their audiences, for instance, by targeting proponents of a financial conspiracy theory using language and concepts linked to it.
- Similar to other scams, investment scams span the entire internet, with operators using different web surfaces at different stages in the kill chain. Scammers leverage social media to lure their targets with promises of riches and financial protection and redirect them to messaging apps, where detection and disruption can be more difficult. They then gain the users’ trust, persuading them to invest or deposit funds, including cryptocurrencies, into fake "fast return" investment schemes or crypto exchange platforms.
- Inauthentic personas often impersonating or using the images of celebrity, political, and financial figures represent a core component of investment and crypto-investment scams. Investment scammers either pose as the individual they impersonate or as "investment coaches," using the pictures of rich-looking individuals or international financial figures under a fake name to trick users into trusting them.
- The investment scams Graphika highlights in this report were often low-quality but high-quantity, with hundreds of inauthentic accounts that posted similar messaging with the same promises. Many of the accounts engaged in the investment scams were newly created, indicating that platforms are actively working to block or remove them. Scammer-operated accounts went as far as impersonating deceased influencers to reach their target audiences and sometimes contained inconsistencies that did not match the persona's identity. Some of the impersonated influencers have repeatedly spoken up against this tactic.