Scammers are now cloning trusted news websites to steal your money
Cybercriminals are cloning reputable news websites to promote fraudulent cryptocurrency and investment schemes. The scams use fabricated articles, such as a fake Guardian piece about billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, to lure readers into clicking malicious links. This tactic is part of a broader campaign targeting outlets like the BBC, exploiting trust in established media.
- ▪Fraudsters create convincing clones of legitimate news sites and populate them with fabricated stories.
- ▪The fake articles often feature high‑profile figures, e.g., billionaire Jim Ratcliffe, to attract attention.
- ▪These articles encourage readers to click links promising secret investment opportunities, typically involving cryptocurrency.
- ▪The scheme leverages the credibility of trusted outlets such as The Guardian and the BBC to increase victim trust.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Digital Trends |
| Canonical URL | https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/scammers-are-now-cloning-trusted-news-websites-to-steal-your-money/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 13 Jul 2026 04:01:47 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-13T04:10:36.723Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-13T04:10:36.723Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | uCFXr13k7L1u |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Seeing a story on the website of a trusted news organisation is usually enough to lower your guard. Cybercriminals know that, and they’re increasingly exploiting the credibility of major publishers to steal money from unsuspecting readers. The latest example involves fake Guardian articles featuring billionaire Jim Ratcliffe. Still, the scam is part of a much larger campaign that’s also impersonating the BBC and other well-known media outlets. According to The Guardian, fraudsters are creating convincing clones of legitimate news websites and filling them with fabricated stories designed to lure readers into bogus cryptocurrency and investment schemes. Instead of trying to hack victims directly, the scammers first convince them they’re reading real journalism.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Digital Trends.
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