Three Canadian men reportedly lost hundreds of thousands of dollars after watching videos that appeared to feature celebrities endorsing a cryptocurrency investment scheme.
According to CTV News Toronto, Mohammed Haqq came across a video on social media in which Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was explaining how Canadians can make money by investing in cryptocurrencies.
Hack decided to start investing with 1,200 Canadian dollars ($880), but after he thought he had saved up $424,775, he discovered his account was actually empty.
The video he watched turned out to be a deep fake, manipulated by artificial intelligence (AI). lost CAD226,000 ($165,610) was paid into the scam.
A similar deepfake video was seen by Darrell Budnick, who was scammed out of C$130,000 ($95,262) after he thought he had made a profit from investing in the scam, only to later discover he was unable to withdraw his funds.
“Now I'm panicking. My heart condition is getting worse. It hurts and I'm scared. I thought I was safe but now I'm not.”
Giovanni Pugliano was also duped after watching a YouTube video by Elon Musk that claimed he could get rich by investing in cryptocurrencies with just a few hundred dollars. The video was fake, and Pugliano lost 17,000 Canadian dollars ($12,457).
“I put a lot more into it than I expected and suddenly I was out of money.”
According to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, investors across the country lost C$148 million ($108.45 million) to fraudulent investment scams in the first half of 2024. The majority of these scams involved cryptocurrencies.
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