When an advert that appeared to feature star fund manager Anthony Bolton appeared on Abbie’s Instagram feed, it immediately piqued her interest.
The ad promised stock tips and information from what seemed to be a credible source. It contained a video in which the former Fidelity International fund manager appears to tell viewers: ‘I set up a WhatsApp investment group, every day I will share three stocks and the latest investment news… my goal is to help more investors.’
Abbie, 28, from London, ignored it at first. ‘But after a few days of being bombarded with the same ad, I decided to click on it,’ she says.
She had recently received a six-figure inheritance from her grandfather and was looking for somewhere to invest it.
After clicking on the advert, there was a link to join a WhatsApp group. Once in the group, she found a handful of members who appeared to be potential investors like herself, alongside experts sharing stock tips. Members were told they could use their own investment platform to buy the recommended stocks and there would be no fee for the advice.
The first stock the experts were talking about was Pheton Holdings (PTHL). This is a real company based in China, which was founded in 1998. It develops healthcare solutions for brachytherapy – a type of radiotherapy – and was listed on the US Nasdaq stock exchange in 2022.
Abbie was unconvinced by its potential. But the WhatsApp experts kept telling the group that Pheton was on the verge of being acquired by pharmaceutical giant Gilead Sciences, which could see its share price soar.
All the while, Pheton’s share price continued to rise, until after three weeks it had tripled in value to reach $18. Abbie was told it would keep rising to $45.
‘I thought, there’s literally proof in front of my eyes that it is going up, so am I missing out on something?’ she says.
She gave in to the pressure and bought shares using trading platform Robinhood.
The experts in the WhatsApp group also looked legitimate.
Their names and headshots matched those of employees of genuine US firm Denver Wealth Management.
There were also ‘broker assistants’ in the WhatsApp group who appeared to be women with professional-looking photographs, with names such as Melissa, Gwen, Olivia and Belle.
At first Abbie invested around £7,500, but continued to buy more shares as Pheton kept rising.
‘I kept adding more money into it because the ‘experts’ in the group were so convincing and partly because of the stupidity that comes when you see that you can make a lot of money really quickly,’ she says.
‘It gets in your head, and you think: I can pay off my partner’s student debt and I can pay for our wedding. You make plans in your head.
‘I’m a very rational person, and I think I lost that.’
Deceit: Sophisticated new technology allows scammers to generate fake video and audio of a real person speaking, such as the one of Anthony Bolton (above)
Over three weeks, Abbie invested £45,000. Then, suddenly, once the shares ticked over $30 each, their value plunged. In just a matter of minutes they dropped to $1.65 and the value of the company crashed from over $440million to just $23million.
Shareholders around the world lost money in the blink of an eye.
But at the same time a group of anonymous scammers – likely members of organised criminal gangs – became very rich.
That is because the advert that Abbie saw on Instagram was not genuine at all. Scammers had used so-called AI deepfake technology to create a video of Anthony Bolton speaking, when in fact he had nothing to do with the advert at all and had never spoken those words in his life.
I’m embarrassed at how stupid I was – I should have recognised the signs, and I should have known better
The sophisticated new technology allows scammers to generate fake video and audio of a real person speaking to make them appear to say things they haven’t said.
The WhatsApp group was run by scammers, who tricked unsuspecting victims to invest in companies to drive up their share price. They were using the names and profile pictures of genuine people to give themselves an air of legitimacy – without their knowledge or permission.
Known as a ‘pump and dump’ scam, fraudsters artificially inflated the value of Pheton Holdings by investing in it themselves, promoting it to unsuspecting investors and sharing false information about it.
Once the share price soars, the scammers sell their own shares for a significant profit, leaving those still holding shares nursing heavy losses.
Six months ago, average daily trading volumes for Pheton averaged in the tens of thousands. In the weeks leading up to the ‘dump’ they rocketed into the millions.
Abbie’s partner also invested £3,000 in the company, and she had told her parents to do so too, but fortunately they…
Read More: Deepfake of fund manager Anthony Bolton could savage your savings in ‘pump and