<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe 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,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
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 \u201ccease and desist\u201d letter.<\/p>\n
OCCRP reached out to Medium for comment but had not received a reply by the time of publication.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI’m not aware of me being in any online scams currently,\u201d Fogle added \u201cI know they popped up again. At the end of last year, I thought about hiring the team again to send the letters,\u201d he said. But he confessed that he had begun to think that pursuing it was a hopeless task.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have absolutely no way of controlling it,\u201d he told OCCRP.<\/p>\n
\u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Victims named billionaire Elon Musk, French footballer Kylian Mbapp\u00e9, 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is, I suspect, all about shortcut psychological messages. I am there to portray \u2018trusted financial source,\u2019 Elon Musk has \u2018huge wealth,\u2019\u201d Martin Lewis, a British broadcaster and financial expert whose identity was falsely used to lure several U.K. victims, told OCCRP. \u201cThe stories I\u2019ve heard of people who\u2019ve lost their life savings, and their self-esteem, due to these criminals are heartbreaking \u2013 worse that many do it as they say they trusted \u2018me.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.occrp.org \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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.\u00a0 \u201cThe 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2183873,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25173],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2183872","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artists"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/Celebrities-Voice-Anger-And-Frustration-Over-Online-Scam-Ads-That.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2183872","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2183872"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2183872\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2183874,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2183872\/revisions\/2183874"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2183873"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2183872"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2183872"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2183872"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}