The celebrities most used in investment scam ads: ranking based on 705 detections
In this article
In short: between 26 October and 5 November 2026 we logged 705 detections of fraudulent investment platforms in 24 countries. 678 of them featured at least one famous person, always without their permission. In total we counted 321 different celebrities. The most used are not actors or influencers but TV news journalists, central bank governors and finance ministers: the people we trust most when it comes to money.
The 15 celebrities used by the most platforms
“Platforms” is the number of different fraudulent platforms using their image; “ads” is how many times we saw them in an ad.
| # | Celebrity | Country | Platforms | Ads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Bruno Vespa | Italy | 22 | 38 |
| 2 | Marcos Galperin | Argentina | 13 | 21 |
| 3 | Fabio Panetta | Italy | 12 | 21 |
| 4 | Martin Lewis | United Kingdom | 12 | 16 |
| 5 | Abelardo de la Espriella | Colombia | 11 | 33 |
| 6 | Mario Giordano | Italy | 11 | 20 |
| 7 | Élise Lucet | France | 11 | 13 |
| 8 | Jaime Gilinski | Colombia | 9 | 25 |
| 9 | Javier Milei | Argentina | 9 | 22 |
| 10 | Giancarlo Giorgetti | Italy | 9 | 14 |
| 11 | Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo | Colombia | 8 | 22 |
| 12 | Ricardo Roa | Colombia | 8 | 21 |
| 13 | Ana Botín | Spain | 8 | 11 |
| 14 | Germán Ávila Plazas | Colombia | 7 | 15 |
| 15 | Christine Kelly | France | 7 | 7 |
Top of the list is Italian journalist Bruno Vespa, whose image is used by 22 different platforms. He is followed by Argentine businessman Marcos Galperin, with 13, and Bank of Italy governor Fabio Panetta, with 12.
Who the scammers pick
- News journalists and presenters: Bruno Vespa and Mario Giordano in Italy, Élise Lucet and Loïc de La Mornais in France, Adrienne Arsenault and Rosemary Barton in Canada, Martin Lewis in the UK. The ad usually fakes an interview or a segment on their show.
- Central bank governors and finance ministers: Fabio Panetta (Banca d’Italia), José Luis Escrivá (Banco de España), Álvaro Santos Pereira (Banco de Portugal), Pierre Wunsch (National Bank of Belgium), Tiff Macklem (Bank of Canada), Giancarlo Giorgetti in Italy and Mehmet Şimşek in Türkiye. This is the most cynical choice: the face of the person who supervises the financial system is used to promise what no supervisor ever would.
- Heads of state and government: Javier Milei, Abelardo de la Espriella, Mark Carney, Sanae Takaichi and John Mahama, presented as if they backed a “government” platform.
- Business leaders: Marcos Galperin, Jaime Gilinski, Luis Carlos Sarmiento Angulo, Juan Roig, Xavier Niel and Akio Toyoda, credited with a “secret” way to invest.
None of them promotes investment platforms. For 132 of the 321 we found a public denial or a press article confirming the ads are fake; we link it on each person’s page.
Country by country
Scammers choose local faces. The same platform changes face depending on the country the ad targets.
One platform, many faces
Three in four platforms we logged use more than one celebrity, and 133 use three or more. The extreme case is Quantum AI: 36 different celebrities in 12 countries, from Canada to Japan. That is why searching “celebrity name + investment” is not enough to tell whether an ad is real: what you need to check is the platform.
If you have seen one of these ads
- Do not sign up or leave your phone number. A fake adviser will call you within hours.
- Search for the platform, not the celebrity, on this site and on your country’s regulator list.
- Report the ad on the network where you saw it (on Facebook: ⋯ › Report ad › Fraud or scam).
- If you have already paid, follow these steps as soon as possible.
For how the scam works step by step, see Celebrity investment scams. The full list of celebrities we have detected is in Impersonated celebrities.
Methodology
We counted the ads our team logged and reviewed between 26 October and 5 November 2026. A celebrity counts once for each different platform that uses their image, however many ads it appears in. The figures are a minimum: they only include the ads we saw. We will update the ranking every month.