Fogle himself went as far as asking a legal team to do a forensic investigation to try to work out where the ads were coming from.
“The team could not find any of what everyone was saying. They found it absolutely impossible because they were all targeted. So what I found amazing was how highly sophisticated this was,” he said.
Fogle added that what they did discover was that the articles had appeared on U.S. publishing platform Medium, which he said also took them down after his lawyers sent a “cease and desist” letter.
OCCRP reached out to Medium for comment but had not received a reply by the time of publication.
“I’m not aware of me being in any online scams currently,” Fogle added “I know they popped up again. At the end of last year, I thought about hiring the team again to send the letters,” he said. But he confessed that he had begun to think that pursuing it was a hopeless task.
“I have absolutely no way of controlling it,” he told OCCRP.
“I can put posts out occasionally warning people that I’m not going to be endorsing cryptocurrencies. And you know, to try and be thoughtful about what you believe and what you don’t believe. But when my own mother believes it, it’s a hopeless situation.”
A Tried And Tested Formula
Scam victims from around the world who spoke with OCCRP and its partners described being tricked by online ads and fake articles promoting investment schemes which were mocked up to look as though they had been published in mainstream media and endorsed by public figures.
Victims named billionaire Elon Musk, French footballer Kylian Mbappé, Canadian-American actor Ryan Reynolds, British TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson, and Spanish F1 racing driver Fernando Alonso among numerous celebrities whose images were used to lure them in.
“This is, I suspect, all about shortcut psychological messages. I am there to portray ‘trusted financial source,’ Elon Musk has ‘huge wealth,’” Martin Lewis, a British broadcaster and financial expert whose identity was falsely used to lure several U.K. victims, told OCCRP. “The stories I’ve heard of people who’ve lost their life savings, and their self-esteem, due to these criminals are heartbreaking – worse that many do it as they say they trusted ‘me.’”
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.occrp.org ’
