Scammers are impersonating finance experts to steal millions – and the real ones are struggling to stop it

Globe and Mail

3 hours ago

Last week, Bank of Montreal chief investment strategist Brian Belski became the latest finance heavyweight to warn his social-media followers about imposters posing as him to scam investors.
Mr. Belski alluded to bogus Instagram and Facebook ads under the account name 'BMO Belski,' which sought to lure users to investment groups on WhatsApp through AI-generated videos and other content.
'To be clear: I only post from this official LinkedIn account and do not engage on other social platforms,' the real Mr. Belski wrote on LinkedIn.
To those who've seen the hyper-realistic videos purporting to show Mr. Belski turning his head from side to side, promising to 'share three stock picks and the latest market insights every day' with his WhatsApp community, this may have come as a surprise.
While scams impersonating celebrities and politicians have proliferated for years, fraud targeting investors through fake advice from big names in finance is now multiplying, with the real experts struggling to get the content taken down.
Law enforcement, legal experts and social-media giants are split on who should take the blame.
Last week, prominent Bay Street economist David Rosenberg spoke out about a scam that used his identity, telling The Globe and Mail that several investors reported collective losses to his firm exceeding $1-million.
Victims were lured to WhatsApp groups recommending stocks that swung dramatically in price, creating the illusion of quick profits. Once investors put in more money, the stocks' prices plummeted.
Mr. Rosenberg and his firm reported the scam to both Meta Platforms Inc. and the police but eventually went public after the ads continued to circulate for months.
David Rosenberg says investment scam using his name bilked victims out of hundreds of thousands of dollars
Meta spokesperson Julia Perreira said the content of those ads violated the company's policies and it removes scam ads when detected.
In March, Financial Times economics commentator Martin Wolf and his colleagues played 'whack-a-mole' with Meta, trying to take down deepfakes of him giving investment advice.
'The voice didn't sound fully like me,' Mr. Wolf said in an interview, adding that his avatar did look convincing otherwise.
Data from Meta's Ad Library seen by Mr. Wolf and his colleagues revealed that the ad reached nearly one million users by the end of April in the EU alone. Roughly 960,000 were reached after the Financial Times first notified Meta about the deepfakes.
In Canada, net losses from investment scams where the initial contact was on social media have risen 95 per cent since 2021, reaching $128.4-million last year, according to the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre. Meanwhile, the number of reported victims has fluctuated, suggesting that the scams are becoming more ambitious in how much money they steal.
'Fraud is not only becoming more common, it's becoming more convincing,' said Detective David Coffey of the Toronto Police Service's Financial Crimes Unit. 'That is really what we're seeing with AI – they're scraping the internet for these legitimate businesses and they're utilizing them to commit their own frauds.'
People may also be losing more money to imposter scams because it's become difficult to grow investments the traditional way, said Tanya Walker, managing partner at Walker Law, who specializes in fraud litigation.
'Thirty years ago, interest rates could have been 16 per cent,' she said. 'For quite some time, our interest rates have been low.'
She said investors may think to themselves, ' 'Why am I going to invest in a GIC with the bank at 3-per-cent interest when I could get 14 or 15 per cent?' '
Who should be held accountable for these scams is a divisive question.
'Once it gets to be a police report, it's too late,' Det. Coffey said. Most investment scams targeting Canadians are orchestrated from outside the country and across regions where local officials are not friendly to Canadian law enforcement, he said.
But Kenneth Jull, partner at Gardiner Roberts LLP, specializing in financial crimes and corporate compliance, said relying on social-media companies to police their clients is both logistically and legally challenging.
'They wouldn't have the resources to do it, even if they wanted to,' he said.
Under Canadian law – and similarly in the United States – social platforms have limited legal liability for users' content based on the safe harbour principle, said Mark Lokanan, a professor at Royal Roads University specializing in AI-driven financial-crime investigations.
'They are not liable as long as they do not actively curate, endorse or participate in the scam.'
But the law does hold tech giants responsible when there's credible notice and willful blindness, Mr. Jull said.
The case of YesUp eCommerce set a precedent. It was the first Canadian case where a server company was convicted for child pornography because of willful blindness, Mr. Jull said. In that case, YesUp was warned more than 200 times about illegal content.
However, Prof. Lokanan said the burden of proof can make legal action difficult.
Det. Coffey said Canada has fallen behind global peers on prevention and apprehension of imposter scams. Australia has created a national fraud-fighting agency and brought social-media and telecom companies into the fold.
Australia's reported scam losses fell by almost 26 per cent in 2024 from the previous year, according to official statistics.
But Mr. Jull said Canadian law enforcement can do more to work with foreign officials to apprehend perpetrators, citing the Corruption of Foreign Public Officials Act and its enforcement as an example.
'We don't sit back and say, 'Well, it's Russia, nothing we can do,'' he said.
But Mr. Wolf's case suggests that as much as Meta may be facilitating the problem, it might be in the best position to help solve it.
Shortly before Mr. Wolf published his column on the experience, Meta enrolled him in a new program that uses facial recognition to compare legitimate images of public figures against potential scam content.
'Nobody has been bringing the scam to my attention since,' Mr. Wolf said.