Stephen McDermott

IF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was still shuffling around on this mortal coil in 2026, he might have named three certainties in life: death, taxes and the proliferation of fake celebrity endorsement scams on social media.

You’ve probably spotted these popping up as fake news articles or deepfake videos in which celebrities encourage people to invest money on a supposedly foolproof trading platform.

They usually appear as eye-catching posts with clickbait headlines, in which the celebrity appears to be making some mysterious revelation that will eventually lure readers towards handing over their savings.

The Irish versions have featured a diverse cast that includes names like Miriam O’Callaghan, David McWilliams, Doireann Garrihy, Leo Varadkar, Michael O’Leary and Brendan Gleeson.

It’s basically a new barometer of fame if your face has been stolen for one of these things.

But the latest version of the hoax that I encountered this week developed the scam in a way I hadn’t seen before. The famous person whose face had been used was dead.

That celebrity was Glen Hansard, whose death in a motorbike crash at the end of July prompted a huge outpouring of tributes in Ireland and abroad.

The scam, which I saw in a post on X, was similar to a lot of the others I’d seen before.

It linked to a website made to look like an Irish Independent article, but instead of Hansard endorsing an investment, it leaned into his untimely death by claiming that his partner had discovered a folder among his belongings containing a secret letter.

The letter supposedly contained a bank statement and details of an investment platform that had earned him almost €500,000.

The fake article contained the usual hallmarks of these scams: an emotional story, fabricated quotes (attributed to his widow Maire Saaritsa), the use of the Irish Independent’s graphics and font, and an editor’s note ‘confirming’ that the newspaper had ‘verified’ the investment as legitimate.

The AI-generated image in the scam post I saw this week

The fact that scammers are ruthless enough to use the name and image of a recently deceased celebrity to con people out of money isn’t exactly surprising.

These types of hoaxes have been around so long that the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission has already issued a public warning about them.

Part of the design of these things is to dress a financial proposition in the clothes of a story people have already spent 10 minutes reading.

By the time the reader reaches the money bit, they’ve already been softened up by morbid curiosity and the supposed credibility of a fake piece of journalism.

But the Glen Hansard edition is a particularly grim development for several reasons.

Unlike other fake endorsements, Hansard isn’t around to debunk it or sue social media platforms to stop them from hosting these posts (as people like Micheál Martin and Denis O’Brien have done); instead, that responsibility will likely fall to his grieving partner.

It’s also an example of how scammers are leaning into public awareness of their actions – through warnings like the CCPC’s – and effectively short-circuiting it by factoring in an additional level of persuasion.

In the ‘article’ I saw this week, there’s a fabricated comment section at the bottom in which a man complains that the claims look like a scam, with a reply from a woman who reassures him by saying “I put a little in; I got more back; therefore it’s safe”.

That might seem ludicrous to some people, but even that small detail acts as a kind of a filtering system.

Think about how many times you’ve come across something similar and laughed at how implausible it is.

In a 2012 paper, Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley argued that scammers who run these sorts of operations want to avoid wasting precious time on people who’ll cop what’s going on and walk away.

So asking “who would ever believe this?” might be missing the point, and stop victims from asking for help or reporting the fraud in case they’re made to feel stupid.

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There’s another reason the fake comments are worth dwelling on.

Most of the advice about avoiding online scams urges people to carry out basic checks to verify what they’re seeing.

If someone asked me how to figure out whether the Glen Hansard scam was fake, I’d tell them to search online, to check if a verified news outlet was carrying the story about his secret letter, or see if other people had similar experiences – like others who had supposedly made similar investments in the past.

The problem here is that there are so many layers built in that anticipate those verification checks, from the use of the Irish Independent’s livery and font, to the editor’s note and the reassuring comment at the bottom of the fake article.

In that sense, the scam has already got ahead of careful users who might think twice and search, read the comments, look for a legitimate news source, and check for reassurance.

The use of Glen Hansard as the face of the scam also gives the fraudsters a convenient explanation for the secretive nature of his supposedly lucrative investment.

They can plausibly suggest that he wanted to keep his windfall private, and that his partner supposedly made the discovery only while going through his belongings.

And again, the singer can’t confirm or deny any of this because he’s dead.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t do any digging on who may have been behind the scam or report it to X or anyone else because the post and article both disappeared a day after I saved the links to both.

It’s another feature of the online scam economy, where hoaxes can look believable for a short time and vanish before any scrutiny can be applied.

Those responsible were not nearly as interested in leaving traces of themselves.

And given how the methods of online scammers have evolved in recent years, it likely means we’ve entered an era where even the dead are seen as fair game to con people out of money.