Tech founders and executives

Synthetic endorsement

Executive impersonation has moved past still photos. Hours of public keynote footage is enough to generate a convincing synthetic clip in which a well-known founder endorses a trading platform. These clips run as paid social ads, which gives them a veneer of legitimacy: people assume an advert was checked.

Recruitment fraud

The second stream is employment. A cloned company page and a real executive's photo support a remote-job offer with a laptop deposit, a training fee, or a "payment processing" role that turns the applicant into a money mule and exposes them to prosecution.

Verification, not recognition

The defence is not recognising the face — the face is correct. It is confirming the claim on a channel the company controls, and refusing any request that involves sending money or receiving and forwarding it.

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.