Fraudsters are creating fake news articles that closely imitate the websites of trusted publishers such as the Guardian and BBC in order to lure people towards fraudulent investment schemes. The false stories are circulated on social media and, when clicked, direct readers to clones of legitimate news sites; from there victims are funnelled to a copycat trading platform where their personal details are harvested. Once details are submitted, a scammer typically calls the victim and pressures them into signing up to a further investment site and handing over money, though no genuine investment ever takes place — the sole aim is to steal cash.

The bogus articles use eye-catching, often fabricated claims: one falsely states that billionaire Jim Ratcliffe stormed out of a BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg, while another claims Sir David Attenborough made money through an investment platform. The clones copy the Guardian's design features and use the bylines of real reporters, with one reader describing a fake as a "very good clone", though the headlines are often unusually long. The financial campaigner Martin Lewis's name and image have also been misused in AI-generated stories made to look like BBC News, and the factchecking charity Full Fact found an image in the Ratcliffe fake carried a SynthID watermark, indicating it was made with Google AI tools. The Guardian says it is part of a UK Home Office taskforce tackling scam ads and argues social media and advertising platforms must do more to block such activity at source.