'They will take your money' - Leading economist David McWilliams warns of 'awful' scam

Well-known economist David McWilliams has issued a public warning about a scam using his likeness to defraud people across the country.

McWilliams told RTÉ's Liveline he has been made aware of “€15,000 taken from a senior on a small pension” through the scam. 

“The people who are behind it are criminal, they’re clever, and they will take your money and you will never see it again.”

The scam - which McWilliams says is facilitated by social media platforms - shows false AI videos and photos of McWilliams advertising crypto, bitcoin and / or an investment opportunity.  

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These false videos depict McWilliams being escorted out of the Tommy Tiernan show, being beaten up or in hospital, as financial elites are supposedly covering-up the crypto information that the likeness has to share. 

The videos and photos are sometimes accompanied by false Irish Independent or Irish Times newspaper branding. 

The economist said: “I want to warn anybody else who may find themselves in this awful situation.”

He detailed that it is often older, more vulnerable people who are taken in by these scams and that “Younger people in general are much more aware of deep fakes, AI, and scams”.

A statement from Meta - which own Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp - in response to the McWilliams fraud being circulated on their platforms read: “scammers are relentless and continuously evolving to evade detection”.

The company added: “It is against our policy to impersonate public figures and we will remove these accounts as we become aware of them.”

Mary, a woman in her 50s, phoned the show and disclosed that when she gave the scammers her phone number, they called her 31 times over six weeks, and became annoyed with her for refusing to give her credit card details. 

McWilliams said: “These are dangerous, dangerous criminals. They will harass you. They will come after you. They will use your details in whichever possible way they can to try and extort money out of you.” 

With the advent of deepfakes and plausible AI video and photographs, he believes that we are moving into the "greatest era of fraud there has ever been”.