IN SOME PICTURES, there are cuts across her face. In others, she has a black eye, or appears to be in the middle of being arrested by the police. Headlines imply that the TV presenter has been prosecuted, exiled, or publically disgraced.
There’s a good chance you’ve seen these ads.
Statistics that Meta provides for the EU show that the profile spreading these posts about a famous TV presenter has had posts promoted into people’s Facebook and Instagram feeds hundreds of thousands of times.
The account is “verified” – as that of an Indian politician who is currently on trial for corruption charges - though the ad library of Facebook’s parent company, Meta, shows that the profile is managed by people from Bangladesh, Belgium, Estonia and Vietnam.
The Journal understands the account was compromised by hackers who launched more than 50 ad campaigns. Many of these have since been removed for breaching Meta’s advertising standards.
All of the more than a dozen remaining ads on that account feature photos of a badly injured woman purported to be RTÉ presenter Maura Derrane. All these posts are pure fabrications.
Another example shows what appears to be a screenshot of the Irish Independent featuring an image of two Gardaí restraining a woman whose face is blurred. “The charges against Maura Derrane have been confirmed,” the false headline reads.
The headline was never published in the Irish Independent and the image of the woman being arrested was taken at an Extinction Rebellion protest. The original, high-quality image clearly shows that the woman is not Derrane, and photos of injuries do not appear elsewhere and have been doctored.
In response to The Journal’s queries, which included a relevant Ad Library ID, Meta said that the promoted posts have since been taken down for violating their standards.
Derrane is not the only Irish celebrity to feature in such scam ads, and Facebook and Instagram are not the only platforms that they appear on.
The ads, which usually falsely claim that a well-known Irish figure has accidentally revealed a quick way to make money involving cryptocurrency platforms, have featured politicians such as Leo Varadkar, Micheál Martin and Enda Kenny, as well as television presenters such as Ryan Tubridy, Colette Fitzpatrick, Ciara Doherty, Brian Dowling, and Alan Hughes.
The Journal has previously debunked hoax ads featuring images of political strategist Alastair Campbell on the Late Late Show with Patrick Kielty; a fake interview of Eamon Ryan on the Tommy Tiernan Show; fake photos of presenter Tommy Bowe being escorted by PSNI officers; and fake AI-generated videos featuring Elon Musk and Irish BBC newsreader Tadhg Enright.
We have also debunked scam ads featuring newsreader Anne Doyle, who has again featured in recent scam videos advertised on YouTube that three readers reported to The Journal.
These ads usually suggest that the celebrities involved had done something illegal, embarrassing, or scandalous.
“BREAKING NEWS: Allegations against Brian Dowling confirmed!”, one post on Facebook reads, next to what appears to be an image of the TV presenter dressed in a prisoner’s uniform with a law enforcement agent behind him. The story and image are fake — Dowling’s face was digitally added to a photo of a baseball pitcher who served time in a California prison for possession of cocaine.
Micheál Martin, who late last year resolved High Court proceedings against Google seeking information about who was behind “fake adverts” he says were used to defame him, still appears in numerous fake ads for scams, which are currently prevalent on Twitter/X.
“The scandal erupted during a live broadcast when Micheál Martin accidentally revealed his secret on the programme,” a hoax article promoted on social media begins.
It goes on to falsely claim that Martin is being sued by the Bank of Ireland after he “became enraged” and revealed he made money from a cryptocurrency platform live on TV.
There is a typical formula for stories promoting these scams, and Martin is far from the only instance of a story claiming that a celebrity was being sued for revealing a secret money-making platform.
“Scammers may pretend to be a celebrity advertising crypto on social media or a reputable website,” the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) told The Journal.
“The ad will promise their followers high returns on their investment. For example, asking their followers to take part in a giveaway scheme for free cryptocurrency.
“Cryptocurrencies are unregulated, which means that no central bank guarantees them or controls their supply, and this could perhaps be a reason why cryptocurrencies are a popular choice for scammers.”
About one in five people have experienced some form of fraud, according to survey results the CCPC shared with The Journal.
A series of scam ads promoted by verified accounts on Twitter claimed that Alastair Campbell was being sued by the Bank of Ireland (both the bank and Campbell confirmed to The Journal that this was not true), who also supposedly shut down a broadcast of the Tommy Tiernan show in which he interviewed Eamon Ryan.
In both cases, the Bank of Ireland was supposedly trying to suppress knowledge of a crypto scheme from being released to the public.
The Bank of Ireland is a private bank and its supposed actions make little sense in these stories. It’s possible the scammers behind these fake stories are confusing it with the Central Bank of Ireland, which does have a broader remit to protect the public interest.
This is just one clue that those running these scams are not based in Ireland, along with a lack of understanding of the characters featured in the stories, nonsensical English, and details that would jar with Irish readers, such as the Californian prison and law enforcement uniforms that appeared in the fake story about Dowling.
Clicking on these scam ads can be a disconcerting experience. In part because the reader is often taken to a clone of a real, well-known website, reformatted to push software that promises to make them rich.
Most of the time, the site is an almost exact replica of a news outlet, such as Forbes, RTÉ or the Irish Independent. Often, these sites carry the bylines of real journalists who work for these outlets, falsely implying they had written the articles.
Sometimes, though, the link keeps redirecting the page, bouncing through different URLs until eventually landing on a URL that sometimes doesn’t even feature the fake news story that the social media ad promised — instead of a sportstar getting arrested, it tells the tale of a newscaster being fired.
Leave the page open long enough and sometimes it will change in real-time, turning from a cloned news site into what appears to be an online electronics store.
These quirks may all be an effort to avoid being detected or banned — it’s hard for a social media platform to block a target URL if it can’t figure out what it is, and content moderators who see a different page than what was described by a concerned user are likely to assume a mistake was made in the report.
Meta has policies against sensational content and restrictions on promoting cryptocurrency in their ads.
Facebook has further Community Standards that prohibit content that “purposefully intends to deceive, willfully misrepresent or otherwise exploit others for money or property”.
However, in the past it has taken legal action for the company to admit wrongdoing, such as last December when they admitted in Dublin court that “several false, misleading and defamatory advertisements” promoting a cryptocurrency auto-trading program were published about Qatari businessman and ex-husband of Janet Jackson, Wissam al Mana.
“Protecting users is our top priority,” a Google spokesperson told The Journal. “We have strict policies that govern the kinds of ads that we allow to run on our platform and we invest heavily in the enforcement of our policies through a combination of human reviews and automated systems.
“We continue to invest significant resources to stop bad actors and we are constantly evaluating and updating our policies and improving our technology to keep our users safe.”
The Journal also inquired about the ads that have recently appeared on its platform.
“We are currently reviewing these ads and if we find any ads that breach our policies, we’ll take appropriate action,” they responded.
X.com did not respond to The Journal’s email, as appears to be its approach to all media inquiries. However, its website claims they prohibit fraudulent and deceptive content, including the use of “clickbait tactics” and misleading claims in advertisements.
The policy does not appear to be effectively enforced.
As a test, The Journal was able to find such celebrity scam ads on Facebook and X.com in less than a minute, just by scrolling through the main feeds of these sites.
An attempt to find scam ads by clicking on random YouTube videos did not yield similar immediate results.
During these informal tests, the celebrity most frequently featured in the scams promoted by verified accounts on X.com, other than Micheál Martin, was the site’s owner, Elon Musk.
International coverage of similar scams indicates that the same process has been in operation for years and has targeted countries across the globe, often using local celebrities that have supposedly been arrested, fired or disgraced, accompanied by fake images.
In February, Ireland’s media regulator, Coimisiún na Meán, opened a contact centre where illegal activity can be reported. However of the 150 contacts that Coimisiún na Meán has received, none of them were related to online fraud or scams, they said.
“Under the Digital Services Act, online platforms are obliged to act on illegal content when they become aware of it,” Coimisiún na Meán told The Journal.
“If users believe that a scam ad is illegal content, they should report it to the platform where they see it.
“If the platform does not take action on this content, the user can make a complaint to the Coimisiún na Meán contact centre by calling + 353 1 963 7755 from Monday to Friday, 8am – 6pm or by emailing usersupport@cnam.ie.”
If you have spotted any scam ads or misinformation you would like to share, please email us at factcheck@thejournal.ie.
The Journal’s FactCheck is a signatory to the International Fact-Checking Network’s Code of Principles. You can read it here. For information on how FactCheck works, what the verdicts mean, and how you can take part, check out our Reader’s Guide here. You can read about the team of editors and reporters who work on the factchecks here.
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