Online trading scams: 147 million embezzled from savers by fake brokers

Easy profits are often promised on social networks and the net with online trading. But beware, because there are serial scammers getting rich behind your back. Of the 18,714 cases of scams in 2024, 26 per cent involved fake online trading. Exactly 4,909 cases, investigated, 388 people. But be careful, because fake online trading is worth 80% of the sums embezzled in 2024, so we are talking about almost 147 million euros of savers' money gone up in smoke. How to defend yourself? We talk about it with police director Barbara Strappato.

Online trading scams are around the corner for everyone and are increasingly sophisticated. They often even make use of promotional videos that reproduce the voice or appearance of CEOs, politicians, people who are loved by the public. "The year 2024 was characterised by this way of perpetrating the crime of false online trading through videos whose performers were very well-known people, from the President of the Republic to the Prime Minister, to many entrepreneurs from well-known families, but also journalists who cover the economy. And this somehow makes people calmer when they listen because they are well-known faces. They have used it a lot by doing a very simple technical job, because combining voices to images we have very, very high performance videos. And they make these very people advertise investment platforms. And the users believe that that platform can be useful, can bring economic benefits to them, and they invest without asking themselves any more questions. And the economic value of these scams is really very important'.

The victim is reached very frequently through videos, but also through phone calls that seem to come from experienced brokers who also have a very serious tone of voice, who speak very affably about the topics. Investing one's own capital, one's own money, is a very serious thing, one can do it but by following lawful paths, therefore going to consult the sites that are available to those who want to invest, those of Consob and the Bank of Italy, to understand where one can really invest'.

"We do not fall into the nets of these fraudsters because then tracing the money we have invested becomes very difficult," Stroppato explains. With the advent of artificial intelligence, the manipulation of content has become easy for fraudsters, and artificial intelligence in particular has given rise to deep fakes. "For example, advertising investment platforms and then perpetrating fake online trading scams. Now technology is neither born good nor bad. It is man's use of it that then makes it good or bad. Certainly, we must activate all our weapons to protect ourselves, because reasoning, it is absolutely not possible that institutional offices lend themselves to advertising, for example, investment platforms. We have tools to defend ourselves and we must activate our intelligence to try to defend ourselves as best we can'.

The scam can be divided into several stages from the hooking of the victim to the failure to return the entrusted funds. How difficult is it to regain possession of the money stolen by the fraudster? "Time helps when the complaint comes quickly. The problem is that fraudsters do not easily let the swindled person off the hook and start proposing to pay further small sums to unlock the account and get back possession of the money one has already invested. This obviously delays the complaint and time, I repeat, does not play in our favour because the money very easily goes around the world. Of course we always try, even when investing using cryptocurrency. It also depends a lot on the type of international cooperation, which is certainly more advanced with some countries and less advanced with other countries' So it depends, on a case-by-case basis, on the circuitous routes money takes. "It is not a simple investigative activity, but we, I repeat, we always try, also because often the sums invested are huge and therefore it is necessary to attempt very, very decisively this pursuit of the capital that has been invested".