Everybody saw the scams. Nobody owned them: Why fake news investment campaigns still slip past brands, platforms and enforcement

Fake news investment scams are now one of the clearest examples of how modern scams defeat both technical controls and organisational accountability. They imitate trusted news brands, misuse the names and faces of public figures, run through ads and platform content, capture leads through polished landing pages, and then push victims into phone, messaging or payment flows. Generative AI has made this pattern harder to contain: fake endorsements, cloned articles, synthetic video and localised creative are cheaper to produce, faster to test and more convincing at scale. The harm is not marginal. Australians lost 2.18 billion to scams in 2025, with investment scams alone accounting for 837.7 million. By 27 August 2025, ASIC had already shut down more than 330 investment scam websites using celebrity images, a 25 per cent increase on the same period in 2024. By 8 April 2026, ASIC said it had coordinated the removal of 11,964 phishing and investment scam websites during 2025, along with more than 1,100 online investment scam advertisements on social media.

This session argues that the reason these Scams keep returning is not only poor detection. It is an ownership failure hiding inside a technical problem. A media organisation may see logo misuse. A platform may see an ad, account or page. A bank, exchange or payment provider may only see downstream financial activity. Enforcement may see a threshold issue. Legal, fraud, cyber, brand protection, risk and compliance teams often work to different evidence standards, timelines and decision paths. The scam is campaign-based, but the response is still too often artefact-based. That mismatch lets the campaign survive, migrate and reappear even after individual pages or ads are reported. This matters even more in Australia’s current regulatory setting, because the Scams Prevention Framework is built around governance arrangements and reasonable steps to prevent, detect, report, disrupt and respond to scams, not merely to record them.

Using fake news investment scams as the case study, this talk will show what a more effective model looks like. Technically, it means moving from single-page review to campaign-level link analysis across domains, cloned layouts, reused narratives, impersonated public figures, contact channels, advertiser infrastructure, wallets, accounts and payment destinations. From a GRC perspective, it means defining ownership before the incident, setting evidence standards that support rapid takedown and escalation, assigning decision rights across cyber, fraud, legal and brand teams, and measuring disruption rather than just report volume. The session will also examine how cloaking, impersonation and generative AI content production break traditional abuse handling, and why closed-loop intelligence sharing is needed if brands, platforms and enforcement are to act on the same scam picture rather than fragmented artefacts.

This is a practical session for cyber, fraud, trust and safety, risk, compliance and policy leaders. It turns a familiar scam pattern into a sharper question for the conference: when a scam crosses brand abuse, platform abuse, payment risk and enforcement boundaries, who is actually responsible for stopping it?