Financial advisors and bank staff

Clone firms

The most effective investment fraud does not invent a company; it clones one. A real, regulated firm's name, registration number, address and staff photographs are copied onto a near-identical website with one changed contact detail. A victim who checks the register finds a genuine authorised firm and believes they have verified the caller.

The 'safe account' call

The second use is a live telephone fraud. A caller presenting as the bank's fraud team says the account is compromised and the balance must be moved immediately. The caller may send a staff photo and reference recent genuine transactions obtained elsewhere. The transfer is authorised by the victim, which makes recovery far harder.

The advisors themselves

Advisors find their headshot attached to products they have never sold, and firms field complaints from people who were never clients. Regulators maintain clone-firm warning lists for exactly this reason.

If these photos are yours

You are the second victim of this scam. The money goes to strangers, but the face, the name and the reputation are yours — and the angry messages from defrauded people land in your inbox, not the scammer's.

• Save everything: profile URLs, screenshots with visible usernames, message threads, and the dates you found them.
• Report the fake profile on the platform itself under impersonation, not spam. Impersonation reports are actioned faster and you can usually attach a photo ID.
• File a report with your national fraud body (IC3 in the US, Action Fraud in the UK, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, or your local police cyber unit).
• Submit the scammer's contact details — the email, phone, wallet or profile handle, never your own — to our database so the next person who searches that identifier finds a warning instead of a fake romance.
• If someone contacts you believing they were talking to you, be kind and clear: send them to a search page so they can verify the details for themselves.

If you were talking to one of these profiles

Slow down before you send anything. Ask for a live video call on a platform the other person did not choose. Ask for a photo holding a handwritten note with today's date and an unusual word you pick. Run the phone number, email, username or wallet address through our database. A genuine person will pass all three in minutes; a stolen-photo persona will produce excuses — bad signal, hospital shift, offshore rig, army firewall, "you don't trust me".

Never send money, gift cards, crypto or copies of your own ID to someone you have not met in person, no matter how complete the story sounds.