Coronation Street and Emmerdale stars have been warning viewers against scammers using their likenesses to con fans out of their savings.
Appearing on Celebrity Scams: Are You At Risk?, Corrie‘s Dan Brocklebank and Emmerdale‘s Lisa Riley shared the ordeals some of their fans had to go through after being targeted by scammers.
Riley, who plays Mandy Dingle on Emmerdale, explained her image has been used online to sell fake diet pills.
“They say you will lose 15kg in three weeks, and the amount of people that have bought slimming aids with my face linked to it is off the scale,” she said.
Brocklebank, known for the role of Billy Mayhew on Corrie, said something similar has happened to him too.
“It’s happened so many times, people set up what they call my personal account or my official account and start to message people, and they’re being conned out of thousands of pounds,” he said.
Impersonators target vulnerable people, with some fraudsters taking on the identity of celebrities and pretending to start a romantic relationship with their victims under false pretences.
“They start talking under a fake account commenting on the storyline telling someone you’re beautiful, you’re gorgeous. And I’ll step in and say he’s not real!” Riley said.
“And this is happening more and more, they’re hunting vulnerable women.”
The show interviewed Kirsty (not her real name), a woman whose mum had been scammed twice by people impersonating two different Emmerdale stars.
In 2023, the woman was contacted by someone she thought was Emmerdale‘s Tony Audenshaw. After noticing a change in her mum, Kirsty “drove round to her house and there were some suitcases in the hallway”.
“She told me that she’d fallen in love with somebody, he’s on Emmerdale. I immediately got suspicious, she said he’s my soulmate, I know him really well,” Kirsty recalled.
The scammer conned Kirsty’s mum out of nearly £20,000 in gift cards. The two women managed to get some of the money back, though a year later Kirsty’s mum fell victim to a second scam.
This time, someone was impersonating Emmerdale‘s Jeff Hordley and even sending the woman videos of Hordley created with AI technology.
“I noticed that she’d spent about £2,000 in a three-day period. I phoned her and the first thing she said was, ‘It’s not a scam, he sent me videos of himself this time.'”
