Fake election news ads are luring people into investment schemes. We got some taken down

Fake CBC News articles that link to sketchy investment schemes are flooding social media with sensational headlines about the Canadian election and other recent political developments.

CBC's visual investigations unit reported on a similar scam in late January, where fake articles lured victims to Quantum AI, a well-known scam. But this latest generation of fake content has been updated to take advantage of new events with surprising speed. One fake article referencing a federal tariff relief initiative is dated March 23 — Prime Minister Mark Carney made a similar announcement days earlier, on March 21.

After CBC News reached out to Facebook parent company Meta and the Toronto-based company hosting one of the website domains, several of the Facebook accounts behind the ads were disabled and one website domain was suspended.

Clicking on one of the Facebook ads takes the user to a realistic-looking CBC News article. (Other news outlets have also been spoofed, though most of the ads seen by CBC News were purporting to show an article from the public broadcaster.) Read on, though, and the articles tout a "zero risk" cryptocurrency investment scheme.

In one case, the Facebook ads even featured an AI-generated deepfake video of CBC journalist Rosemary Barton, as well as Elon Musk, and Carney. In the fake video, Carney says the government has certified the safety of the alleged investment product and that "none of the investors will lose their money."

"All you need is to invest $350 and start making profit from the first month," the deepfaked prime minister said. The deepfake was created using manipulated video originally taken from Carney's Liberal leadership launch speech in January.

"There is not going to be a decline in the number of these soon, particularly with the election," said Marissa Sollows, director of communications for the Financial and Consumer Services Commission of New Brunswick, which issued warnings about the scheme this month.

"We are working certainly with our national and international counterparts, regulatory counterparts and enforcement staff at examining all kinds of different ways that we can look at disrupting and raising awareness of this — recognizing that it is such a Whac-A-Mole game. When you take one down, 10 more pop up."

Variety of trading platforms linked

Each fake article directs readers to a realistic-looking trading platform, such as Canada Crypto Fund, TrueNorth, or Token Tact.

The New Brunswick FCSC issued warnings about all three of those entities in March, warning they are "not registered to deal or advise in securities in New Brunswick."

The fake articles often were hosted under strange and unrelated URLs — marslandingjournal.com or gossipgiraffes.com, for example — while some were more convincing, such as cbc-politics.com.

One of the ads CBC News investigated was posted by a Facebook page called "Tokens Ailive." Clicking on the links in the article sent CBC News to two different sites claiming to be trading platforms at two different times.

The trading sites then ask users to make a minimum deposit — usually several hundred dollars — to begin trading, either by submitting credit card information or by calling a representative.

That process closely resembles the Quantum AI scam previously investigated by CBC News.

'Scammers use every platform available:' Meta

CBC News also analyzed the websites hosting the articles and trading platforms. 

Two of the trading platforms are hosted by Cloudflare, a major internet firm based in the United States. The company did not respond to CBC's request for comment.

One of the sites registered its domain name with Tucows, a Toronto-based company. After CBC News contacted Tucows, the company suspended the domain. 

Madeleine Stoesser, Tucows's senior manager of corporate communications, clarified that the company uses a wholesale model. That means the website owner purchased the domain from a reseller. "We work closely with our resellers to address issues similar to this domain," Stoesser told CBC News.

During the investigation, CBC News saw fake ads sharing the articles being listed, and in some cases removed, from Meta's Ad Library, a database of ads that run on Meta platforms that was created to address transparency concerns.

CBC News reached out to Meta for comment and provided several additional examples of pages sharing the fake ads. Meta said in a statement the company had removed the Facebook ads CBC News flagged and disabled the accounts sharing them.

"This is an ongoing industry-wide challenge — scammers use every platform available to them and constantly adapt to evade enforcement. Our work in this area is never done, and we continue to invest in new technologies and methods to protect people on our platforms from scams," the spokesperson said in a statement.

The RCMP, along with the Canadian Securities Administrators and the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, noted in a recent statement a specific concern with "the increasing prevalence and sophistication of online investment scams." Investment fraud cost Canadians $310 million in 2024, the organizations said.

The CSA noted that for the first time, "scams among younger Canadians have trended upwards."

Ryan Duquette, national lead of digital forensics at MNP, a consulting firm, told CBC News that several issues hamper the ability of social media companies and law enforcement to crack down on schemes like these.

"It is very, very challenging. [It's] so multifaceted between social media doing their investigations and perhaps police doing their investigations as well," Duquette said.

We're still tracking ads like this. If you see something suspicious, you can get in touch at [email protected]. You can also learn what to do about it here. And Meta has its own anti-scam information.