a fraud influencer is someone who has a large following but the difference is the engaging content they are putting out there is fraud. they are promoting this glamorous, criminal lifestyle and sometimes even using social media to sell criminal services, fraudulent services. now, you looked into an influencer called tankz. how many followers does he have online and what are those followers seeing? he has over 150,000 followers across different platforms. tiktok, instagram, snapchat, twitter, and he posts these day in the life videos, day in the life of tankz, day in the life of a clicker a slang word for fraud and you can see him glamorising fraud, waving large amounts of cash, wielding multiple bank cards and on instagram he is selling manuals, methods he calls them, and how you can commit fraud.
youtube videos and my case was a little bit different because the content i was making wasn t fully monetiseable. it contained copyrighted music which actually i didn t own the rights to and had to look elsewhere in terms of, as we ve talked about, diversifying your income streams with regards to social media so merchandise, fan funding, models such as patreon and other kind of things like that. so, chris, going back to you if the majority of people are not making much, if any, money out of this approach at least at the moment, how do the social media companies make money out of what people are posting? well, they make money out of our attention. - we are engaged with all. of these creators, we find them really interesting and like to develop - into their lives. i used to watch becky . when i was younger and from that, basically, they have our attention so they serve adverts l against that in many instances. you can buy an advert. on youtube that costs an awful lot of money, you can
flowing very well any more? it can take a very big toll on your mental health as well so i think opportunities for creators to, kind of, regain that connection with their audience in a real direct way is something that s going to be really beneficial going forward. we have talked about making money via social media but of course, for every well intentioned musician, there is someone perhaps with slightly darker motives. i have been speaking to cath, who is a reporter from the bbc panorama programme who has been investigating a new kind of criminal, the fraud influencer. fraud influence is someone who has a large following that the difference is the engaging content they are putting out there is fraud. they are promoting this criminal lifestyle and sometimes even using social media to sell criminal services, fraudulent services. now, you looked into
on how you can commit fraud. you bought some of these manuals, these guides, to have a look at what was on offer, so what did you find? i can t go into too much detail because we don t want to teach people how to commit fraud! fair enough. but it came in the form of a cloud storage link, and you click on it and find various step by step guides on how to exploit weaknesses in the systems of online retailers, banks, a guide on how to defraud the government s universal credit scheme. he also provided you with links to websites where you can go and buy people s stolen personal information, known as fulls. we can hear a little bit from your panorama now. # i m a london scammer, i see it, i want it, # i click it.# this is the sound of tankz, a fraud influencer. he posts tracks on youtube bragging about scams, while keeping his true identity hidden. he has more than 150,000 followers across various social media platforms. tankz and others like him
content is being served to our audiences and it s often done in a very hard to read, almost like black box algorithmic way, which is hard to decipher and decode and you often second guess yourself and what you re doing. am i doing something wrong, why are my views not flowing why are my videos not performing very well any more? it can take a very big toll on your mental health as well so i think opportunities for creators to, kind of, regain that connection with their audience in a more direct way is something that s going to be really beneficial going forward. we have talked about making money via social media but of course, for every well intentioned musician, there is someone perhaps with slightly darker motives. i have been speaking to cath, who is a reporterfrom the bbc panorama programme. he has been investigating a new kind of criminal, the fraud influencer.