The stars of BBC’s Dragons’ Den are being used to falsely lure would-be investors on to suspicious Bitcoin trading platforms.
Despite a drop in market prices, interest in the sector is growing. Unfortunately, for many newbie traders, the lure of an offer that may seem too good to be true can often be too much to pass up. As a result, investors are finding themselves duped into schemes that promise great returns but fail to live up to perceived expectations.
In a report from The Telegraph, it noted that this tactic is increasingly being used with promises of multimillion-dollar returns on small investments. Bitcoin Trader is one such platform, the report states, that claims a “typical” user can earn $13,000 a day for as little as 20 minutes of work.
Ludicrous promises such as these should instantly raise red flags, but when they are advertised with celebrities such as those from Dragons’ Den, they provide a level of authenticity to them. One of the dragons, Peter Jones, has been falsely used to promote these adverts. So much so, that a fake news article is reported to have appeared on Yahoo news claiming that two entrepreneurs managed to get Jones to buy 25 percent of their business for £2 million.
Fellow dragon Deborah Meaden’s reputation has also been used, with claims that she invested £250 live on air before making over £100 in eight minutes through the platform. Unsurprisingly, both dragons have refuted these claims while Action Fraud has issued warnings on the use of celebrity images to endorse scams.
Despite this, though, victims can still be found. One 76-year-old man is reported to have invested £300 into Cryptopoint, which is connected to Bitcoin Trading, after he saw an advert of it while on the internet. He initially became suspicious when a pushy sales representative continued to ask him for information that he didn’t think was relevant. He has since received a refund of £225, the remaining allegedly taken as a fee.
This, however, isn’t the first case where the images of celebrities have been used to promote fake ads. In April, Martin Lewis, founder of consumer help site MoneySavingExpert, revealed that he was suing Facebook in a defamation lawsuit. At the time, Lewis wrote that within the past 12 months, the social media site has published around 50 fake Martin Lewis adverts that are regularly seen by millions of people in the U.K.
Unfortunately, while steps are being taken to highlight the risks of investing in offers that sound too good to be true, there will also be some who will still blindly invest in fake offers.
What do you think about sites using celebrities to push ludicrous investment claims? Let us know in the comments below.
Featured image from Shutterstock.