Man loses £3,250 after falling victim to deep fake Elon Musk scam on Facebook

A Huddersfield man has warned others after losing thousands due to an elaborate deep fake Elon Musk scam. John Cairns, 61, lost £3,250 after seeing a convincing video on Facebook purporting to be Musk, the world’s richest man, advising people to invest £250 in a new AI trading platform. Mr Cairns had seen the advert in 2023 and had decided to invest some of the money he had received from selling his late father’s home to his sister.

After providing his contact details, Mr Cairns spoke on the phone to an ‘account manager’ who explained how everything worked and told him to download MetaTrader 5, a legitimate trading platform, onto his phone, along with the AnyDesk app, which gives third parties remote access to your device. The father-of-two was then persuaded to transfer money to prove that he could easily withdraw it. ‘This was all new to me, I had the money there so I just went for it and made a payment of £250 into the account. Making the minimum investment, I thought ‘What was the harm?’ Mr Cairns said.

He added: ‘The ‘account manager’ advised me through some live trading in currencies and, by the end of that first conversation, he told me that I had made a £82 profit. ‘This carried on for a while and in the right-hand corner of the screen, I could see what profit I was making. He said if I wanted to make more I should invest more. ‘So, I transferred a further £1,490 and could see the profit growing rapidly. When he asked me to invest a third time, I asked him if I could make a withdrawal, just to satisfy myself that I could.’.

After withdrawing about £82 to test the method, he was convinced the scheme was genuine, so he deposited another £1,510. But when Mr Cairns began to make more money, the ‘account manager’ became pushier and refused to let him withdraw his profits. ‘When my investments had grown to about $5,000, I had asked if I could withdraw his original investment and just carry on using the profit I had made. He turned around and said that would be a slow way to invest, he wanted me to get into gold, Tesla, Netflix, Starbucks etc, to increase my investment. By doing what I wanted to do it would take me too long to get where I wanted to be,’ he said.

When Mr Cairns met his daughter for lunch after making the investments, he told her he had around $10,000 in his account – which made her sceptical. ‘She Googled the company name and saw the reviews about them not paying their customers back, so that set off alarm bells for me,’ Mr Cairns said. After that Mr Cairns wanted to stop immediately and close his account to get his money back but was ‘palmed off’, eventually deciding to take the loss.

Mr Cairns has now enlisted the help of National Fraud Helpline solicitors to try to recover his money from banks Santander and Chase, who they say have a duty of care to protect their customers from fraud. Fiona Bresnen, a lawyer at National Fraud Helpline solicitors, said: ‘With the advancement of AI we are sadly seeing more of these types of deep-fake scams using well-known figures. ‘The Elon Musk video is incredibly convincing and we understand that thousands of people have fallen victim to this particular scam. It is becoming increasingly difficult for anyone to tell what investments are legitimate. When it comes to investment opportunities our first piece of advice is always, if something looks too good to be true it probably is.’.

Mr Cairns, who has a two-word warning for people who see these adverts, said: ‘I would rather use the money investing through proper channels and with proper investigation, and have something nice to retire with. ‘I just want to warn people against clicking links attached to faked Facebook videos with major global figures, including Richard Branson and Sir Keir Starmer, apparently promoting investment schemes.

‘Just don’t – completely ignore it. It’s a shame because there are people who might have a wee bit of money and want to see if they can do better for themselves. In these times there are a lot of families out there who will try anything to try and make a decent life for themselves and their family.’. ‘I was wet behind the ears doing this, and I just wanted to dip my finger in the water with these investments and see how it would go. It ended up being a big dip in the water.’.

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