A BIZARRE Facebook scam involving Holly Willoughby and cryptocurrency has been doing the rounds in Covingham.
It involves the This Morning presenter and false claims she invested in the digital payment system live on air.
A user in the Covingham Community Facebook page posted a fake Daily Mirror article that claimed a female police officer from the area appeared on the popular daytime show to talk about the thousands she had allegedly made from a company called Bitcoin Up.
The headline reads ‘Female police officer from Covingham has revealed how she earns £18,000-a-month. People think I have a sugar daddy!” – but the URL is not the Daily Mirror’s own.
It is presented as a news story but reads like an advert for the cryptocurrency business and claims that the police officer, ‘Emma Davis’, had challenged Holly to deposit money live on air.
It then says: “After she deposited the initial £200, the algorithm started to buy bitcoin and other currencies for cheap and selling them for higher price very quickly.
The fake Mirror article
“Within only seven minutes, Holly made £60.24 in profit and had a total balance of £260.24 in her account.”
The scam is aimed towards convincing people that the exchange happened on national television and that national media covered it – but that is not the case and a female police officer called Emma Davis has not appeared on This Morning.
The two women pictured in the article – the police officer and the lady actually on the This Morning sofa – are also clearly different people.
The used who posted the link into the community page, Denise McGrath, has also not posted anything else despite being a member since May 2021.
The claims about Holly Willoughby
The Sun reports that this is one of two cryptocurrency scams that have made the popular presenter their figurehead.
Both scams are the same, with pictures of Holly Willoughby hosting This Morning with fake quotes implying she had invested live on air appearing on both.
A source told the national paper: “Holly has nothing to do with this scurrilous scheme and it’s dreadful that con artists think they can scam innocent people out of cash using tactics like this.
“The website looks completely convincing and it is not surprising people think it could be legitimate.”
Many of Britain’s biggest celebrities have been used in similar adverts as scammers weaponise their familiar faces to convince people to do things against their interests.
Money-saving guru Martin Lewis often found himself being used to promote scams and ended up suing Facebook for hosting them and allowing them to spread.
Facebook settled that lawsuit and agreed to donate £3 million to an online anti-scam charity.