The Bank of England has warned the public about a wave of AI-related scams online, after strange adverts began circulating on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that use the likeness of two well-known figures. The Bank urged people to be vigilant about this kind of content and to report it when they see it. The warning followed a flood of unusual messages that many users found cropping up repeatedly on their timelines over recent days.
The adverts are built around a fabricated confrontation. They show Reform leader Nigel Farage attacking the Bank of England's governor, Andrew Bailey, in a variety of ways on the set of Question Time. The clips were eye-catching and odd enough that many people began asking why they kept appearing in their feeds, with the images turning up again and again for users scrolling through the platform.
Despite their realistic appearance, the clips are not genuine. They are sophisticated deepfakes made using artificial intelligence, manufacturing a scene that never happened. The point of the adverts is not the political spectacle they appear to show, but where they lead. If a user clicks on the link, they are taken to a fake BBC post that carries links to online trading websites.
It was that mechanism that prompted the Bank of England to speak out and warn the public of AI-related scams online, calling on people to stay alert and flag such material. Nigel Farage, whose image was used without his involvement, told reporters that he had been in touch with X about getting the adverts taken down, as the fake clips continued to spread across the platform.
Researchers who examined the operation found telltale signs of a scam. Emma Schubert, a research fellow at the Henry Jackson Society, said the group conducted a network traffic analysis of one of the landing pages, which looked like a crypto trading site. The analysis showed that the entire site runs off a single server in Belize, which she described as highly unusual for any real business and a classic signature of a scam site or a disinformation landing page.
Belize, she said, has become something of a hotspot for what is known as bulletproof hosting, where offshore providers sell anonymous servers that are notoriously slow to act or simply refuse to take down content like these deepfakes. Such sites are attractive to petty criminals and ideologically motivated actors alike because they are easy to set up, very cheap to run, and very hard to get removed, operating largely outside Western rules and regulations.
Who is ultimately behind the campaign remains unclear. Schubert said it could be a criminal clickbait scam that is not necessarily ideological, but the pattern also fits the kind of activity associated with state actors such as Iran and Russia, who have used crypto fronts and disinformation networks on similar websites. She noted that the whole area sits in a very grey legal space, but stressed that regardless of the motive, it is something the public should be worried about.