“All the accusations have been confirmed.” “The country has learned the whole truth about her.” Sounding like real media articles, these sponsored publications evoke a mysterious secret that supposedly ended the careers of these stars.
These ads are created by dozens of Facebook accounts managed from all over the world. Some of these accounts have been hacked, such as that of Italian actress Virginia Raffaele, who has not been active on the platform since 2022.
However, the catalog of paid ads on his page contains dozens of fake news stories like those featuring Quebec personalities. The ruse is also repeated in several other regions. In English Canada, the image of federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland is used, while in France, it is comedian Gad Elmaleh who meets a “tragic end.”
Fake brokerage platform
By clicking on the link in question, we find ourselves on a web page imitating the layout of the copied media, like The duty or The Montreal Journal. The fake article claims that the artists in question would be in trouble because they had revealed the existence of a “secret” financial platform that would have allowed them to become rich in a short time. “If everyone starts earning thousands of euros a day on Finance Phantom, people will start quitting their jobs,” one of the articles reads. A mass movement that would harm the country’s economy, it warns.
Using an assumed name and a telephone number created for the purposes of the report, Camille Lopez filled out the online form in one of the articles. A few moments later, she received a call from “Alice”, “senior representative” for one of these fake brokerage platforms.
See excerpts from the call between our collaborator and the fraudsters in the video that accompanies this article.
On the other end of the line, “Alice” tries to extract her personal information from our colleague, including her address and passport number. She praises the merits of an automated brokerage platform “perfect for beginners” and asks him for a deposit of US$350, in order to be able to open his account.
And these fraudsters are persistent. Since her first conversation with “Alice,” our collaborator has received dozens of calls from fake financial advisors trying to convince her to “invest.”
