Reported by
Ben Fogle is a household name in Britain, a wholesome face who has carved a reputation as an intrepid adventurer, author and TV presenter fronting programs about wildlife, rural living and exploration of far-flung places.
Known for taking on massive physical challenges, he has rowed the Atlantic, raced across Antarctica to the South Pole and climbed Mount Everest. In one of his latest TV series, he visits remote locations across the world to talk to people who have chosen to live off the grid.
Fogle, 51, has 639,000 followers on Instagram and regularly posts about his latest projects, his dogs, and his views on life.
But in February last year he took to his account to issue a warning: fake articles in which he apparently endorsed cryptocurrency investment were circulating on Facebook. Fogle told his followers it was a scam.
British celebrity Ben Fogle has warned his Instagram followers about the fake articles featuring him.
The articles falsely claimed that he had revealed a secret get-rich-quick investment scheme on a popular morning chat show. The screenshot Fogle shared on Instagram claimed he was being sued by the Bank of England for revealing the secret to making so much money.
“I started taking action when parents at my kids' school started noticing it, and then family started noticing it. I was getting messages from older family friends who were really concerned because part of the scam was saying that I was being prosecuted for spreading the truth about cryptocurrency,” Fogle told OCCRP.
“Even my own mother was lured in by them. I have no idea how — my mother doesn't even use Facebook,” Fogle said.
“This was a highly focused campaign that targeted people that follow me on other social media channels, and were able to identify the most likely people who would be lured in by me and by the kind of image and hopefully the trust that I have built up. And what was amazing is that these were pop ups. So if you went in search of it, you could not find it,” he said. Fogle asked people who saw the articles to send him links and screen grabs.
The real Ben Fogle.
Some of the fake articles claimed that there was live TV footage of Fogle making his revelation about the lucrative investment scheme. Although Fogle and his legal team did not manage to track the supposed footage down, a would-be investor called Mark apparently saw and fell for such a deepfake video of Fogle. It was his gateway into an investment scam.
“I think for me it all started when I watched the video of Ben Fogle trading,” said Mark, whose calls with scammers were among the huge trove of leaked recordings revealed in the Scam Empire investigation. (Mark is not his real name — he asked to be identified by a pseudonym because he does not want his father to know about his losses.)
About the 'Scam Empire' Project
Mark told OCCRP that he saw promotions of the investment scheme on his Google News feed.
He eventually signed up for a trading platform called FX Admirals in the hope that he would turn an inheritance from his grandfather into enough money for a deposit on a house. He ended up losing at least 25,000 British pounds to the platform, which is subject to a Financial Conduct Authority warning notice.
“I feel terrible that people have been swindled out of money by trusting me,” Fogle said.
“For all I know, some people will never know the truth.”
Examples of fake ads featuring celebrities that attempt to lure would-be investors to scam call centers.
“Responsibility of Big Tech Companies”
Victim testimony and leaked files show that fake online endorsements from public figures including politicians, actors, chat show hosts and musicians are used to lend false credibility to sham investment schemes.
Reporters on the Scam Empire investigation found that these promotions, which often take the form of a news article, usually feature a link that redirects users to a landing page where they’re prompted to enter their personal information.
Those details are collected and shared with scammers by affiliate marketers who are paid for every lead that ends up making a deposit.
Last year Meta, the company that owns Facebook and Instagram, announced it was testing the use of facial recognition technology to combat scam ads that made unauthorized use of famous public figures.
The company’s ad policy prohibits the promotion of “schemes or offers using identified deceptive or misleading practices, including those meant to scam people out of money or personal information.”
But Fogle said while Facebook had taken down the fake articles about him after his legal team sent them a letter, they soon popped up again.
“I think it's a responsibility of the big tech companies who are making such huge amounts of money to employ people to police it. You know, we have police who patrol our streets who try to stop people from mugging you, to try to stop people from pickpocketing you, to try to stop people from robbing your houses.
“I argue that the internet is kind of no different now to the high street. It's an extension that we're all living with now,” Fogle told OCCRP.
Fogle himself went as far as asking a legal team to do a forensic investigation to try to work out where the ads were coming from.
“The team could not find any of what everyone was saying. They found it absolutely impossible because they were all targeted. So what I found amazing was how highly sophisticated this was,” he said.
Fogle added that what they did discover was that the articles had appeared on U.S. publishing platform Medium, which he said also took them down after his lawyers sent a “cease and desist” letter.
OCCRP reached out to Medium for comment but had not received a reply by the time of publication.
“I'm not aware of me being in any online scams currently,” Fogle added “I know they popped up again. At the end of last year, I thought about hiring the team again to send the letters,” he said. But he confessed that he had begun to think that pursuing it was a hopeless task.
“I have absolutely no way of controlling it,” he told OCCRP.
“I can put posts out occasionally warning people that I'm not going to be endorsing cryptocurrencies. And you know, to try and be thoughtful about what you believe and what you don't believe. But when my own mother believes it, it's a hopeless situation.”
A Tried And Tested Formula
Scam victims from around the world who spoke with OCCRP and its partners described being tricked by online ads and fake articles promoting investment schemes which were mocked up to look as though they had been published in mainstream media and endorsed by public figures.
Victims named billionaire Elon Musk, French footballer Kylian Mbappé, Canadian-American actor Ryan Reynolds, British TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson, and Spanish F1 racing driver Fernando Alonso among numerous celebrities whose images were used to lure them in.
“This is, I suspect, all about shortcut psychological messages. I am there to portray ‘trusted financial source,’ Elon Musk has ‘huge wealth,’” Martin Lewis, a British broadcaster and financial expert whose identity was falsely used to lure several U.K. victims, told OCCRP. “The stories I’ve heard of people who’ve lost their life savings, and their self-esteem, due to these criminals are heartbreaking – worse that many do it as they say they trusted ‘me.’”
Martin Lewis, a well-known finance expert in the U.K. whose image has been used to lure people into scam investments.
As in Fogle’s case, the original ads and articles that victims say they fell for are difficult to trace online. But the leak from the Israeli/European network includes a pdf of one of the fake promotions which follows exactly the same format as described by Fogle and victims.
The article, which bears the logo of Canada’s CTV News network, claims Canadian-American actor Sandra Oh revealed “details of a secret profit-making platform” in an interview with U.S. talk show host Stephen Colbert. It describes how Oh helped Colbert sign up to a trading platform on live TV and that he saw profits within 20 minutes.
The article claims that the show was shut down by the “Canadian Security Commission.”
At the bottom of the article is a step-by-step guide on how to sign up for the platform and a link to a registration form.
“Deny These Criminals The Oxygen of Promotion”
Authorities in several countries around the world have issued specific warnings about investment scams using celebrity endorsements.
Australia’s National Anti-Scam Centre warned consumers in March last year about fake news articles and deepfake videos of public figures that endorsed and linked to online investment trading platform scams.
“These fake videos and news articles circulating on social media and video sharing platforms, often claim that the online trading platform uses artificial intelligence or other emerging technologies such as quantum computing to generate high returns for investors, but it is not true,” said Australian Competition and Consumer Commission deputy chair Catriona Lowe as part of that warning. (The anti-scam centre is run by the ACCC).
“We know of an Australian man who lost $80,000 in cryptocurrency after seeing a deepfake Elon Musk video interview on social media, clicking the link and registering his details through an online form. He was provided with an account manager and an online dashboard where he could see his investment supposedly making huge returns. But when he tried to withdraw the money — he was locked out of his account,” Lowe said.
New Zealand’s Financial Markets Authority issued a similar warning in May 2024 saying it had received reports about “fake celebrity endorsement advertisements on social media, promoting online investment schemes.”
“We have identified multiple websites that are part of this scam but believe there may be more connected as they frequently change,” the warning said.
“We are aware of several New Zealanders who have invested through these websites and are now unable to withdraw funds, with additional fees requested before allowing withdrawals.”
An event assistant showing off deep fake recognition technology at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on March 4, 2025.
Lewis, the financial expert, sued Facebook in 2019 to try to prevent misuse of his identity on the platform. He said he settled when Facebook offered to pay 3 million British pounds to charity and set up a scam ad reporting feature. But, he said, things are “worse now than they were then.” Lewis is calling for tougher action on governments, regulators and big tech to “deny these criminals the oxygen of promotion that they currently get.”
“It’s virtually impossible to stop this activity, as it currently stands,” he told OCCRP. “This will continue until we make it more expensive for social media firms to publish adverts than the money they make from enabling all and sundry to bash out quick ads.”
Celebrities Fight Back
Like Fogle, some celebrities whose images have been co-opted by scammers have spoken publicly to warn their followers about the fake promotions.
But OCCRP’s partner Swedish Television (SVT) helped two public figures go further.
As part of the Scam Empire investigation, SVT set up sports reporter Olof Lundh and television presenter Jenny Strömstedt – both of whom have been used to promote investment scams – with Facebook accounts and burner phones so they could make contact with the scammers themselves without them knowing their true identities.
After filling in their details on investment scam ads on Facebook, the celebrities were quickly called by people who said they would help them sign up.
Swedish journalists Olof Lundh (left) and Jenny Strömstedt were invited by SVT to make contact with the scammers using their identities to reel in victims.
Strömstedt asked the person who called her, who gave his name as “Adam Roy,” to click on a message she sent him. It revealed that he was calling from Estonia, not London, as he had claimed.
She went on to reveal her identity and confront him on the call:
“My name is Jenny Strömstedt, I work at a TV station in Sweden. I am a household name. And I am often used by you to get people to click on the links and invest in your products, and then you scam them. And we have actually traced you, because you're not in London…You are in Tallinn.”
“No, I am in London. I don’t know what you're talking about,” he insists.
“The one and most important question I'd like to ask you is how you feel about scamming people out of their life savings?” Strömstedt says.
“No, ma’am, I don't really understand what you're talking about,” counters “Adam Roy,” before hanging up soon after.
“It was incredibly satisfying to do this confrontation for all the people who believed in a fictional Jenny Strömstedt and gave away their money,” Strömstedt told SVT.
But like Fogle, she feared that her attempt to expose the scammers was just a drop in the ocean.
“He’ll think about this for two seconds. Then he’ll go into his Excel sheet and call the next number,” she said.
