Fans of entertainment are at risk of being scammed as fraudsters are using the faces of celebrities to promote crypto schemes.
The global losses from crypto scams in 2025 are projected to be over 2.4 billion dollars according to the Global Anti-Scam Alliance. One fast-growing form of scams is celebrity impersonation. This form of fraud also targets entertainers to confer spurious credibility to crypto investments. Trust and emotional attachment to celebrities are often exploited to perpetrate these scams, which spread through social media, YouTube, and fake news sites.
In this article, I will analyze the impact of entertainment on fans and crypto scammers, discuss case studies, assess the perils of the internet, and explain how these famed personas and law enforcement authorities are fighting blatant violations.
How Scam Artists Exploit Celebrity Images in Crypto
Scammers have an arsenal of weapons, and impersonation is one. Through the use of deep fake videos, shady interviews, and fraudulently generated social media accounts, fans are often made to believe that their celebrities are endorsing a crypto asset or platform.
A standard approach employs false news segments featuring celebrities promoting a certain coin or trading app. These are usually accompanied by phoney analytics relating to crypto assets. In July, one of these scams utilized AI-generated actor Pedro Pascal’s footage, talking about the ‘next bitcoin’ on a fake talk show. The clip went viral on both Instagram and TikTok, garnering over 3 million views before the account was suspended. None of the statements was true, and Pascal had no crypto project at all.
Scams are usually coordinated with moments when the crypto market experiences substantial movement. For instance, earlier in July, the bitcoin bitcoin price okx from 65,000 to 71,200 within two weeks, and scammers took advantage of the price volatility. These kinds of movement are often used to artificially inflate demand and create a ‘hurry’ to purchase the “something” that might put you and the world ahead of everyone, or in simpler terms, an ‘exclusive’ opportunity that was endorsed by a celebrity.
While several scams are created to offer an unrealistic ‘dedicated’ return on the investments, other scams attempt to redirect users to fake investment pages to steal their personal and digital documents. In most cases, fans only become aware of the massive scams when their wallets go empty, given that the involved celebrities had no idea their images were misused in the schemes.
Recent High-Profile Incidents: What Happened
A series of cryptocurrency scams targeting celebrities has gained more attention in the recent public domain.
Australian actress Margot Robbie denied being part of an alleged token scheme in March 2025, which falsely claimed she was spearheading a female-focused crypto initiative. Through social media as well as a network of phoney financial blogs, the scam was using paid, digitally edited logos and pictures of her. More than 2000 people signed up for the ICO (Initial Coin Offering) before the scam got busted.
Another incident involved a fictitious Elon Musk episode of the Joe Rogan podcast that was advertising a new Ethereum token and was spread through Telegram and YouTube. Thousands were misled by AI-generated voices and visuals. Eventually, the fake podcast got debunked by an independent tech site, InputMag, but not before a lot of people had sent money to scam wallets.
The phenomenon is not restricted to English-speaking countries. In South Korea, impersonation of K-pop stars, particularly BTS members, has spearheaded bold crypto scams. One of these scams also claimed that the management company for BTS was issuing a blockchain fan token and that a Telegram group had gained 40,000 members in 5 days.
The Risks for Entertainment Fans in the Digital Age
Film, television, and music lovers are often emotionally attached to certain celebrities and are, therefore, more likely to fall victim to scams that seem personalized. The one-sided bonds fostered by social media make this vulnerability worse, particularly when fans think they are interacting with a celebrity’s brand or social media page.
The act of self digitally impersonating someone is not new, but the modern technology that fraudsters use, including social media snippets, spoofed media sites, as well as AI video generation, makes fraud a lot harder to spot. As reported by the research and intelligence firm specializing in the digital world, Group-IB, celebrity-focused crypto frauds increased by 79 percent in the initial half of 2025 as compared to the same duration in 2024.
In addition, these scams are often encountered on less regulated and unmonitored platforms, including Discord, TikTok, and WhatsApp, where there are no rules governing marketing. Scammers can easily conduct phoney contests, impersonate celebrities, direct users to phishing sites, and lead people to sites where they collect private information, all without face-to-face interactions.
The mirage of scarcity sometimes entices victims with phrases like “limited access”, or “exclusive invite.” In a lot of cases, this amounts to a very different picture – emptied bank accounts, crypto vanished, and no one to take responsibility.
How Celebrities and Authorities Are Responding
As the threat continues to escalate, some celebrities have began to take action and issue formal warnings. Taylor Swift’s lawyers sent out cease and desist letters to multiple websites promoting fake NFTs using her image back in June this year. As well, Tom Holland put out a PSA telling fans not to trust any crypto projects claiming to have his endorsement saying, “If I’m involved, you’ll hear it directly from me—not from a meme on Reddit.”
Europol, in collaboration with Interpol, has taken action against international cryptocurrency scam syndicates. A joint task force has been created and several suspects were arrested in Romania and Spain for a celebrity impersonation scam in May 2025.
The FTC in the US has been focusing on the lack of ad fraud detection algorithms put into place on social media platforms by urging them to improve their systems. The challenge these platforms face, however, is the international aspect of the scams.
As for technological platforms, they are slowly improving. Instagram and TikTok have begun to identify AI alterations, while YouTube is adding to its policies by banning the use of deepfakes to impersonate public figures for profit. In the meantime, however, fans remain the first line of defense against the spread of emerging technology.
