One of the weirdest social crypto scams has moved to LinkedIn
Kevin O'Leary is, in fact, a free man.
Pictures of Kevin O’Leary getting arrested popping up on LinkedIn feeds this week means I get to once again dive into one of my favourite weird crypto scams.
LinkedIn accounts that, at a passing glance, seem to be CBC journalists have promoted posts with AI-generated pictures of O’Leary being led away by police, promising to fully analyze the “event” at a story link in the comments.
The (clearly fake) accounts re-use the same profile pictures and, other than a headline claiming to work for CBC despite living in Ireland, have no work or personal information.
The posts are promoted by companies under various names and generic logos, and their profiles have no employees or corporate info.
If you click through to the “story,” you are taken to an imitation of the CBC News website, where O’Leary sits down for an obviously fabricated interview with Bloomberg host Haslinda Amin about how great crypto investment platform Immediate Maximum is and how much money it has made him (it should go without saying, but Immediate Maximum is definitely a scam).
After the Q&A, the story goes on to describe how the Bank of Canada brought O’Leary into court (something it can’t actually do), because apparently Immediate Maximum can make people so rich that it could “endanger economic stability.”
Flashback: The scheme is basically the LinkedIn version of one that briefly ran wild on X early last year. Fake images of personalities like Mary Berg and Sandie Rinaldo in handcuffs and courtrooms were put into promoted posts that vaguely referred to some kind of scandal. Clicking through would take you to a similar Q&A promoting a crypto platform on a CTV lookalike site.
Why it’s happening: The vibe of these posts is similar to the “chumbox” of links you see at the bottom of some sites, where headlines about a celebrity scandal appear between weight loss tricks and things doctors don’t want you to know. O’Leary makes sense as a subject, since he generates a strong love-or-hate reaction, but daytime TV hosts also frequently appear because of their squeaky-clean images (which make a scandal more surprising) and their popularity with older people (who tend to be more frequent scam targets).