A man says he’s lost his entire life savings and incurred extensive debt after falling for a fraudulent investment scheme featuring celebrity deepfakes.
Kitchen builder Des Healey saw a fraudulent ad on Facebook featuring money-saving expert Martin Lewis and billionaire Elon Musk promoting a non-existent Bitcoin investment strategy, BBC reports.
Healey replied to the ad by filling out his contact details, and was instructed to transfer £5,000 ($6,363) into an account with digital banking app Revolut – which was the entirety of his life savings.
That’s when he began speaking with someone named “Carl” who promised “profitable months” ahead. Says Healey,
“To get the £5,000 back, you had to invest £10,000… I wasn’t allowed to withdraw anything until the day that he tells me I can”.
The money was then transferred out of the Revolut account under the guise that it was being “invested” in the alleged Bitcoin scheme.
Not realizing his money was being siphoned away forever, Healey began taking out loans from several different providers totaling £70,000 ($89,090), and transferred the borrowed funds into the Revolut account to invest more with the unknown man.
Healey decided to get his son to listen in on one of his phone calls with “Carl.”
During the phone call, Healey’s son noticed rap music was playing in the background, and began to wonder what kind of bank or call center would be doing that while speaking with customers.
That was when Healey decided to go to the police and it became clear he was being scammed. It turned out that the video featuring Musk and Lewis was simply a deepfake video created by scammers.
A spokesperson for Revolut told the BBC it was sorry to hear that “customers are targeted by ruthless and highly sophisticated criminals”.
“Revolut works hard and invests heavily to protect our customers as best we can through our fraud prevention technologies, analyzing over half a billion transactions a month.”
In a recent announcement, Revolut said that it has saved its customers from roughly $621 million in scams involving crypto and fiat currencies, but the company did not reveal how much its users had lost from the same illegal activity.
“In 2023, we saved customers an estimated £475 million [or $621,880,000] in potentially fraudulent crypto and fiat transactions – we mean it when we say we take security seriously. That’s why we have protections in place, from monitoring patterns of suspicious activity to using two-factor authentication. And we have award-winning, expert support available 24/7 to help you if any issues do arise.”
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