I’ll admit this much, fraudsters on Twitter can be horribly clever.
Their scam begins with a striking post supposedly showing Ed Sheeran screaming as he’s arrested and says: “Prepare yourself for the astonishing truth that Ed has uncovered.”
Other tweets with similar messages show adventurer Bear Grylls and actors Daniel Radcliffe and Tom Holland apparently being tackled by police.
It comes days after Martin Lewis, the founder of Money Saving Expert, warned that he'd been the victim of a deep fake in which AI was used to mimic his face and voice.
Bear-faced lies: fake tweets featuring Ed Sheeran and Bear GryllsThe latest scams purporting to be about Ed Sheeran are promoted tweets, meaning that Twitter gets paid for running them, and the accounts have blue ticks, suggesting that Twitter is endorsing them.
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If you click to find out more then you get through to a fake Guardian newspaper article and what is the most sophisticated part of the scam.
Twitter uses automated bots that are meant to detect links to fake sites, but the crooks have embedded code that spots the difference between a bot and a person.
Only real people are sent to the fake newspaper site, so Twitter doesn’t detect anything untoward.
More Twitter clickbait, this time faking images of Tom Holland and Daniel RadcliffeThe Ed Sheeran version of the “Guardian” story claims that he got into trouble after revealing a money-making secret on the Graham Norton show - never mind the fact that the show hasn’t been broadcast since March.
“The programme was interrupted by a call from the Bank of England, who demanded that the programme was stopped immediately,” it claims.
The article states Ed’s “secret” was the automated cryptocurrency and commodity trading platform ImmediateConnect.
“The program will work around the clock, providing very high profit with no effort,” ran a made-up quote from the singer.
He even apparently had a reason for keeping quiet about this secret for so long: “Why would a taxi driver, physician, policeman or school teacher go to work when they can earn way more money only using technology and give minutes of their time a day?”
Although sophisticated in parts, the scammers are also sometimes sloppy. In the supposed Guardian article about Bear Grylls, what is meant to be a shot of his bank account statement is used to prove how much money he’s made, but the account has the name “Simon Cowell” on it.
Clicking on the link in the story leads to the ImmediateConnect site, though its url was earnoffers.co.
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“Make £950 to £2,200 daily with the world’s most intelligent crypto software,” it boasted. I left my contact details and was phoned by someone now claiming to be from a trading platform called Investixtrade.
He gushed about their super sophisticated trading software, saying: “According to past experience, 10, 15 and 20% returns on a monthly basis is more than realistic, most likely an easy job for us.”
Really? 20% monthly interest when compounded is almost a hopelessly unrealistic 800% annual interest.
He advised me to start small by making the minimum £250 investment so that I could see how the site worked, and then “invest as much as you can to make as much as possible”.
This is the standard ploy for this type of fraud. The site will appear to show your initial investment booming so that you put in more, but it’s all a charade and you’ll never be able to withdraw your money.
I said that I wanted to carry out some due diligence and asked for his office address, which was suspiciously absent from the website.
After a pause he said: “We have multiple branches around the world, the main branch is 1 Canada Square, Canary Wharf, London.”
Which happens to be where the Mirror is based, so I asked which floors of the tower were occupied by Investixtrade.
After a longer pause he said: “The ones I can disclose are 12 to 14.”
Which took me about one minute to prove was a lie, there is no such company in the building.
At time of writing the fake Ed Sheeran Tweet has had 1.2 million views and it’s reasonable to suspect that at least some of them will have been taken in by this fraud.
Later it carried “added context”, as Twitter puts it, with readers warning that this is a scam.
If Twitter knows this, then why isn’t it blocking the tweet?
I asked, but Twitter didn’t answer.
Another set of tweets leading to the same crypto scam website are even sicker than ones suggesting that various celebrities have been arrested.
They claim that stars including Wayne Rooney and chefs Gino D’Acampo and Gordon Ramsay have died in tweets illustrated with black and white pictures, as if out of respect for the dearly departed.
Among those who spotted them was Michael Marshall, project director of the Good Thinking Society, a campaign dedicated to exposing crapola. He wrote about his experience of this scam in The Skeptic.
“Since Elon Musk has taken over Twitter, the platform has become noticeably rife with scams and fraudsters, many of whom are paid-up subscribers whose accounts bear a verified blue check mark,” he said.
“Twitter must surely be capable of identifying these subscribed scammers, yet they are apparently unwilling or unable to do anything to protect users from being defrauded by these digital conmen.
“Worse still, many of these scams circulate in promoted tweets and ads, meaning that Twitter is not only apparently disinterested in stopping them, they are actively profiting from the exploitation of their users”.
You musk be joking: Elon in scam promoted tweetYesterday I spotted another tweet in this fake dead celebrity series. Elon Musk. Although it did not name him, he was pictured below the words: "Please join us in commenmorating his remarkable journey. He had a kind, devoted, and zealous life. Think about his enduring legacy and express your gratitude."
Clicking on the link lead to a fake Forbes magazine article with the headline: "Elon Musk's latest investment has the government and big banks terrified".
A made-up quote has him saying: "You may have heard about this new cryptocurrency investment platform called QuantumAI that's helping regular people in North America, Asia and Europe build fortunes overnight."
There's no mention of him having died, which may confuse anyone who remembers the original tweet that brought them here, but I suppose the scammers are hoping they're too focused on the ostensible fortune to be made to care.
Clicking on the link in the Forbes story leads to the QuantumAI site which uses the same earnoffers.co. url as the ImmediateConnect scam.
The difference is that this scam is not just enabled by Twitter, but by a fake tweet and picture of Elon Musk on his own platform. It would be nice to think that the painful irony might spur him into action.
investigate@mirror.co.uk
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