“What do you mean you're gonna pass? Alan, the only people making money passing are NFL quarterbacks, and I don't see a number on your back.”

That line from Boiler Room (2000) captures the high-pressure world of old-school investment scams, where cold calls and confidence turned lies into profit. The film follows Seth Davis, a high school dropout who lands at J.T. Marlin, a shady brokerage that trains young brokers to push worthless stocks under the guise of legitimacy.

But it’s no longer 2000. Back then, scammers worked phones. Now, they work feeds.

A new kind of fraudster the –– the so-called “finfluencer” –– has emerged on platforms like TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Telegram. They target young, inexperienced investors with promises of fast money, financial freedom, and hacks to escape the 9-to-5.

But behind the filters, crypto charts, and luxury cars lies a darker reality. Some of these finfluencers are pushing their audiences into the waiting arms of organized crime.

How finfluencers turn followers into victims

Finfluencers are kind of like modern-day Seth Davises. They pose as trading mentors, crypto gurus, forex coaches, and, perhaps most enticingly, experts in the Gen Z holy grail of passive income.

Their pitches rely on three key ingredients: lifestyle, exclusivity, and end-to-end encrypted communication. Finfluencers flaunt wealth, living in glamorous locations such as Dubai, frequently taking luxury holidays, and bedecking themselves in expensive clothing and watches. It’s all carefully curated to attract young, ambitious followers disillusioned with traditional investing and ready to believe that success is just a matter of taking a chance.

Finfluencers typically make first contact through direct messages. Once a target responds, they ramp up the pressure using a mix of exclusivity and scarcity tactics.

“Only serious investors allowed.”

“Free access to our premium signal group for the first 100 people to join.”

From there, the prospective victim is moved to private groups on encrypted messaging platforms such as Telegram. Here, they're bombarded with so-called “signals,” pre-packaged trading tips that suggest when to buy or sell specific assets –– often with promises of high returns and low risk. These act as bait, with the illusion of an easy win.

Once confidence builds, the pitch shifts to action. The finfluencer pushes victims to deposit funds with their “preferred” brokers, typically on the premise that they offer better returns, tools, or support. Sometimes, finfluencers even admit they receive a commission. What many victims don’t realize is that these “brokers” are often unregulated offshore entities or outright scams.

The criminal networks behind the finfluencer scam boom

While finfluencers are a key part of this new approach to investment scams, they represent only the front line of a far more sophisticated criminal operation.

At the core of this scheme are the secret Signal groups that provide an illusion of profitable trading. Such groups likely contain fake or reverse-engineered signals, trading tips crafted after the fact to appear accurate and successful. With a dose of manipulated data and persuasive messaging, scammers recreate the kind of “insider opportunity” that once defined the pump-and-dump culture of firms like J.T. Marlin, grooming victims into believing they’re in on a once-in-a-lifetime trade.

The preferred brokers — sometimes linked to regulated entities, sometimes outright clones — play their role, too. They emulate the language of legitimate regulators and perform what’s called “compliance theatre,” requesting proof of identity documents and residence to project legitimacy.

Victims who attempt to do their due diligence face a web of fake positivity, such as glowing reviews and AI-generated testimonials that criminals boost using search optimization.

Trust hacks and algorithm traps

It may be easy to wonder how people fall for these scams, but finfluencers are expert marketers, skilled at building trust and leveraging the illusion of familiarity. Over time, they stop feeling like strangers, and when someone seems familiar, their influence becomes disproportionately powerful.

Social media gives them the perfect platform for massive engagement with minimal or no oversight. Platforms reward engagement, not accuracy, and algorithms push users toward similar content. Once someone interacts with a finfluencer, they’re likely to be served more of the same, further normalizing the scam.

Like hyenas, these scammers set out to target the slowest in the herd. In this case, that’s first-time investors with little financial knowledge and no familiarity with complex instruments like contracts for difference (CFDs), providing the perfect canvas for fake advocacy.

Regulating the unregulated

“To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else’s.” — Dostoevsky.

In a sense, Dostoevsky's words sum up why finfluencers are so successful in duping victims. They don’t just sell financial products. They sell autonomy, which counters their victims’ frustrations of a heavily regulated world.

Regulators are trying to catch up, but the fight is deeply asymmetric, primarily in terms of jurisdiction and speed. Many finfluencers operate in jurisdictions different from their victims. Legal enforcement is inherently slow, particularly when it involves multiple jurisdictions collaborating.

Still, regulators are starting to adapt. The UK’s Financial Conduct Authority (FCA), for example, has begun shifting its tactics. In June, authorities from the UK, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Italy, and the UAE launched a coordinated action that led to three arrests, criminal proceedings against three more individuals, 650 requests to social media platforms for account removals, and the takedown of 50 websites.

The new investment fraud battleground

Banks now find themselves on the frontline of a new kind of financial warfare, one in which their adversaries are agile, unethical, and well-funded. In a recent conversation with a colleague, I described the three horses of the scampocalypse. The first horseman is social engineering, the second is AI (in the form of criminal tools), and the third is instant payments.

We are in an era of influence, where social media empowers bad actors with nefarious intent to distort reality at scale. Finfluencers have become the agent provocateurs in this asymmetric war, their greed fueling the ambitions of sophisticated organized crime groups.

Until platforms are held accountable and global enforcement accelerates, it’s up to individuals to be skeptical, do their due diligence, and resist the urge to trust the glossy promise of easy gains. In the end, if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.