The ‘finfluencers’ paid to spread dangerous myths online

Regulators have begun to take action. The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) reported a 174 per cent increase in actions against influencers last year, with three arrested — the first arrests of their kind. The three are set to appear in court in 2027, charged with encouraging followers to invest in high-risk foreign exchange trading.

Nevertheless, enforcement is still still low: up to 34 million videos are uploaded to TikTok every day, but the number of enforcement actions taken last year by the FCA (including arrests and written warnings) was 74. But the FCA cannot prosecute its way out of the crisis, and there are calls for social media firms to do more.

The problem is not exclusive to one app or website, with misinformation published on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and beyond. But TikTok’s creator-rewards programme pays some influencers based on performance and engagement — a metric that directly incentivises sensationalism. In contrast, Instagram and YouTube rely more heavily on sponsored content and advertising.

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Although there is no publicly available data on the number of videos being uploaded to “FinTok”, as the finance-minded community on the app is known, a TikTok blog posted in May 2024 claimed there was a 373 per cent rise in video posts for financial content the previous year.

The cost of this advice is real, and 55 per cent of those who have followed financial advice on social media have reported losing money, according to TSB. Alarmingly, 49 per cent of people don’t verify the advice.

The FCA acknowledges that finfluencers can offer helpful guidance, but it is targeting unlawful behaviour with prosecutions and mass content takedowns.

The FCA said: “Even when social media platforms remove the illegal content we flag, new accounts pop up in no time with identical, or almost identical, content. They must be more proactive in identifying and removing unlawful content early before it reaches UK consumers.”

The FCA has a Firm Checker tool on its website that people can use to ensure a company is authorised before investing any money.

TikTok ‘tax experts’

Scrolling through posts with the #FinTok tag, you will find self-proclaimed experts talking about tax “loopholes” in bite-sized videos. Yet data from Almond Financial published late last year showed that up to 87 per cent of the financial advice being shared on social media could be misleading.

While the term “chartered tax adviser” is legally protected, anyone can brand themselves as a “tax expert” online. Rowan Morrow-McDade, a chartered tax adviser at Alexander & Co, said that unlike legitimate professionals, these “experts” answer to no one.

“It’s unclear if they act out of incompetence or maliciousness,” he said. “If I gave bad tax advice I would be hauled up in front of a tribunal body. But these ‘experts’ aren’t regulated, so can’t be hauled up in front of anyone.”

Among the claims made in videos is that company directors can cut their tax bill by putting their children on the payroll — but you can’t pay a five-year-old £12,570 for “filing”.

Malli Kini from the accountancy firm Blick Rothenberg, said much of what is being promoted is “sensationalist”, with “lots of suspect or incomplete tax advice”, and cautioned that viewers should take formal advice before implementing anything. He warned that parents employing their children could face a tax bill of up to 45 per cent.

Another series of videos highlights the “trivial benefits” tax rule, through which — the content creators claim — company directors can gift themselves £300 worth of Amazon vouchers every year tax-free. It seems like a victimless perk, with gift cards all but impossible to trace, but Kini warns it is a “nuanced area that is being oversimplified in a brief video”. Frequent use could trigger an investigation by HM Revenue & Customs, rendering the vouchers taxable.

Even the dream of a tax-free company supercar falls apart under closer scrutiny. While influencers claim you can wipe off the tax by buying through a business, they conveniently ignore the fact it is classed as a “benefit in kind”, which could result in a significant personal tax bill. You also typically cannot reclaim VAT on a car unless it is used explicitly for business purposes.

Dan Neidle, a former tax lawyer who runs the think tank Tax Policy Associates, said: “Almost everything these people say about tax is trash.”

Influencers, he said, are just trying to get clicks so leave out critical details. “That would be fine if everyone watching then engaged a tax adviser to find out the correct position. But the reality is these videos are often aimed at people with relatively limited resources, and they won’t do that. The crap advice then becomes actively dangerous.”

Shady stockpickers

It isn’t only the taxman being cheated, but often savers themselves. Research from Barclays last year found that 24 per cent of investors feel pressure to act quickly on unsolicited advice from social media — a figure that doubles to 48 per cent among Gen Z.

On TikTok, daily videos promote the best stocks to buy, and they are designed to trigger a fear of missing out.

George Davey, a financial planner from Titan Wealth Planning, said: “Even if we assume the specific stock choices are well researched, they are rarely positioned as part of an overall and well-diversified portfolio.”

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It is often the “hacks” that sound too good to be true that receive the most engagement. Social media algorithms are designed to push content towards people who are most likely to respond to it, and that includes promises of easy money and a better life, said Jonathan Frost, a former fraud specialist at the City of London Police who works at the anti-fraud firm BioCatch.

He said: “Once they hook their victims, they guide them towards platforms that offer them [the video creator] the biggest kickbacks. These are typically the very same investment platforms that will fail to pay when victims attempt to cash out.”

Because these platforms operate across jurisdictions, it is nearly impossible for victims to claw back their money when “can’t miss” stocks inevitably crash.

Poor regulation

Not all influencers are peddling misinformation. Neesha Craig followed the rules, TikTok’s AI moderator banned her anyway.

The 36-year-old posts under the handle The Fun Money Club and avoids the “get rich quick” rhetoric in favour of practical, low-risk advice, with videos on how to use cashback apps or selling on the second-hand marketplace Vinted. Her content (which has an 89 per cent female audience) encourages people to build savings without gambling on high-risk stocks or crypto.

She makes money through referral fees for sending her followers to legitimate websites. But despite playing by the rules, her account was banned. She said she “cried for a whole day” when that income stream was cut off — and she still has no idea why it happened, despite lodging appeals.

In August TikTok replaced hundreds of human moderators with AI, shifting the bulk of the safety work to systems it said could detect 85 per cent of harmful content.

But in cases such as Craig’s, this system failed to distinguish between a scammer and a legitimate user. Craig said: “You can’t speak to a human any more. You can’t plead your case to anybody. You are at the mercy of a bot.”

After Times Money approached TikTok’s press office, Craig’s account was reinstated, with the warnings removed.

And while some influencers cash in on promoting volatile stocks, Craig said she would never share her own portfolio. “The investing stuff scares me, how unregulated it is. Your investment journey is personal to you, and people will copy you. I am fully aware of that.”

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A better system, she said, would rely on some kind of verification and not just a blunt decision. “I would more than happily sit a course to prove that I know my stuff,” she said. “But these platforms are not going to want the cost of doing that.”

According to TikTok it is committed to the government’s online fraud charter and has taken additional action to block and remove fraudulent content from its platform. It launched a public service announcement on the most commonly searched hashtags related to financial advice and is engaged with the FCA.

Its community guidelines do not allow for misinformation that may cause harm, regardless of intent, although personal opinions that don’t include harmful misinformation are allowed. TikTok said viral misinformation that poses an elevated risk of undermining integrity and trust in institutions is restricted from the “For You” feed.

Of the videos it removed for violating the company’s misinformation policies between July and September 2025, 94.2 per cent were removed proactively.