Politics

Crypto scammers use Farage deepfakes to rinse Reform supporters

Published

5 days ago

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If you’ve logged on to Twitter over the past few days, there’s one thing you’ve definitely seen, and that’s an image of Nigel Farage beating the governor of the Bank of England:

As it turns out, these deepfakes are being used to lure Farage fans into some sort of crypto scam. And the reason these scammers are using Farage as a lure is no doubt because the Reform leader has promoted crypto himself.

And this guy says he’s looking out for his supporters!

Farage de-bankered

If you’ve seen one image of Farage beating the Bank of England’s Andrew Bailey, you’ve seen several:

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The above image – in which Farage has a shooter – proclaims that “Britain needs to see this”. This suggests there was a live broadcast of Question Time in which the Reform leader pulled a gun on another guest, and that this somehow slipped under the radar.

In another image, things got so serious that America had to send one of their police officers over:

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At this point, it’s almost like collecting Pokémon cards. And while the majority of the Pokémon in question are evolutions of Nigel Farage, there is now some variety:

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We personally haven’t seen one of the rare/shiny Ed Milibands, but good luck catching them all.

Some questioned if the Faragalanche is a sign that Elon Musk’s advertising platform is struggling to attract serious clients:

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Ironically, as the BBC highlighted:

Many of the adverts viewed by the BBC were posted by X user accounts with blue ticks – a symbol indicating a subscription to the platform’s Premium tier.

Platform owner Elon Musk previously touted changes to the verification badge as “the only realistic way to address advanced AI bot swarms taking over” after buying Twitter.

You can laugh at how ridiculous these images are, but the fact that there are so many demonstrates they’re working. People are clicking these. But what are they clicking themselves into?

Age of the Scam

According to the BBC:

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By hovering over the links for some of the original posts used in the adverts, the BBC was able to identify that many of them would direct people to sites promoting AI cryptocurrency trading schemes or apps.

Hang on a minute, aren’t AI crypto schemes good? Because we seem to remember Nigel Farage promoting them?

“Take them seriously”, he said, as his wealthy backers rubbed their hands together. And lest we forget, Farage took £5m from a foreign-based crypto billionaire, and has been ducking media scrutiny since we learned of this:

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Here he is in April promoting the crypto scheme of former Tory chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng – the man who delivered the disastrous mini-budget:

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Aren’t Reform supposed to be an antidote to the failed Tories?

People say that cryptocurrencies have no actual use. They say that because they’re too volatile to use as – you know – currency. Saying they’re ‘useless’, however, ignores two clear use cases:

  1. Purchasing contraband outside the ordinary financial system.
  2. Scams.

On the latter, Morgan Stanley writes:

  • Scammers target cryptocurrency because transfers are fast and typically irreversible.

  • Americans lose billions of dollars to crypto scammers each year, often through “too good to be true” tactics like doubling your investments, fake giveaways or job-fee scams.

While the above relates to Americans, don’t worry; Farage and his ilk are determined to import all of America’s ills. And for a sign of what that will look like should Farage take power, just look at what his buddy Trump has been up to:

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Cattle

Here’s what Farage said about the ads, as reported by the BBC:

Speaking to broadcasters during a visit to Grangemouth on Tuesday, [Farage] added that he did not know “whether to laugh or whether to be angry” about the fake ads.

“The trouble is it’s an AI fake but it looks real in every way, and people know that the governor and I have had our disagreements over things over the years,” he said.

You’ll notice he didn’t go into detail about what the ads were pushing. He couldn’t; if he did, he’d be drawing attention to the fact that crypto is the biggest scam since snake oil.

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In all likelihood, the people who are falling for these scams are doing so because they’ve bought into Farage’s shtick. This means many of them are the sort of people who deserve to get ripped off. It’s a problem for Farage, anyway, because the thing they’re getting ripped off by is the thing he’s telling them to invest in.

The question is this: is it a problem because they’re getting ripped off? Or is it a problem because they’re getting ripped off without Farage himself profiting?

Featured image via Paul Reid (Getty Images)

By Willem Moore

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