BBC Breakfast host Naga Munchetty has opened up about becoming the inadvertent subject of a scam.
After Brad Pitt and Sandra Bullock spoke out to warn fans about online scammers, the daytime presenter wrote a piece for BBC News about her own experiences.
“I’m used to seeing misleading articles about myself online, but the screenshots I’ve been sent by friends and followers on social media in recent weeks are a lot more insidious than most,” she wrote.
“Paid-for advertisements are popping up across X and Facebook, some including crudely mocked-up images of me naked – my face badly photoshopped onto someone else’s body.”
After consulting with the research team she works with on BBC Radio 5 Live, they discovered that Naga’s likeness was being used in an effort to try and scam people out of money.
When users clicked on the false clickbait posts spread around social media, they were taken to a fake website designed to look like BBC News’ page, which itself linked to a “scam cyber trading website”.
“The fake photos and articles being spread around online are mildly upsetting, but my main motivation for speaking out about them is to try to stop anyone handing over any money or personal information to these scammers,” she concluded.
However, she lamented that while the BBC’s legal team had been able to get the site taken down, “another website is likely to pop up soon enough, and getting ads taken down from X has become more difficult since it changed ownership”.
“I hope that raising awareness of this scam may at least make it less worthwhile for the criminals involved, and it serves as a useful reminder to not believe everything that you read about me – and be careful what you click on,” she concluded.
Last week, Oscar winner Sandra Bullock warned fans about being taken in by scams using her name and image on social media.
Fellow Hollywood performer Brad Pitt was also prompted to speak out when he was the subject of another prolific scam.