- Crypto scams featuring Martin Lewis are on Facebook.
- Martin Lewis is a financial journalist and founder of MoneySavingExpert.
- These scams lure victims and trick them into investing in fake crypto programs.
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Scams featuring Martin Lewis, the famous British financial advice guru, have spread across the internet – again. This time it’s a crypto scam.
Similar fraudulent adverts flooded Facebook in 2018 and Martin Lewis launched a High Court legal battle against Facebook. The whole debacle ended with a settlement and Facebook even launched a dedicated tool to report scams.
These scams advertise that people can generate large sums of money by making small investments while using Facebook ads for this nefarious scheme. “Invest £190 and generate £3,400,” some adverts say.
Worse still, the links used in these advertisements take users to websites that mimic popular websites such as the BBC or Amazon’s Goodreads. Although poorly designed, these sites resemble the original sites enough to attract unsuspecting victims.
Some of the titles of these fake articles are particularly interesting. “Special report: Martin Lewis’ latest investment has experts in awe and big banks are terrified,” reads one. The site encourages people to invest their hard-earned money in a scam cryptocurrency auto-trading program called Bitcoin Code. The ads reportedly began appearing on May 4.
“The ads in question have been removed by our automated ad review systems,” a spokesperson for Meta told UK online newspaper The Independent. However, it’s unclear whether all of them have been removed or how long they’ve been in place.
In addition, phishing emails are circulating with these links. Last month, Action Fraud, which is run by the City of London Police, issued the warning on Twitter. It was released after the organization received several complaints about fraudulent emails containing fake articles.
Martin has always shown deep concern about these issues and earlier this year signed an open letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson calling for fraudulent paid advertising to be included in the scope of the upcoming online safety bill. . It is currently confirmed that paid fraudulent advertisements would be included in the government’s online safety bill.
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