Martin Lewis —The Face of Fraudulent Facebook Crypto Ads?

Scams featuring Martin Lewis, the popular British financial advice guru, have been spreading over the internet — again. This time, it’s a crypto scam.

Similar scam adverts had flooded Facebook back in 2018 and Martin Lewis had launched a High Court Legal battle against Facebook. The whole debacle ended in a settlement and Facebook even launched a dedicated tool to report scams.

These scams advertise that people can generate large amounts of money by making small investments while using Facebook adverts for this nefarious scheme. ‘Invest  £190 and generate £3400,’ says some of the ads.

What’s worse, the links used in these adverts take users to websites that mimic popular websites such as BBC or Amazon’s Goodreads. Although badly made, these sites resemble the original sites close enough to reel in unsuspecting victims. 

Some of the headlines on these fake articles are particularly interesting.“Special Report: Martin Lewis’s Latest Investment Has Experts in Awe And Big Banks Terrified,” reads one of them. The site encourages people to invest their hard-earned money into a fraudulent cryptocurrency auto-trading program called Bitcoin Code. The ads reportedly started appearing on May 4.

“The ads in question were removed by our automated ad review systems prior”, a Meta spokesperson told British online news outlet The Independent. However, it is not clear if all of them have been taken down or for how long they were up.

Moreover, there are phishing emails going around with these links. Just last month, Action Fraud, which is run by the City of London Police, issued the warning on Twitter. It was posted after the organization received several complaints about the scam emails containing fake news articles.

Martin has always shown deep concern over these issues and earlier this year signed an open letter to Prime Minister Boris Johnson asking to include paid-for scam advertising in the scope of the upcoming Online Safety Bill. It is currently confirmed that paid-for scam adverts would be included in the Government’s Online Safety Bill.