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On Sunday, DN was able to reveal in an international investigative collaboration that the American advertising company Ads Inc of San Diego is behind many of the fake celebrity ads that have spread across social media in recent years.
Now DN can also reveal how Google sells ads to scammers and how celebrity names are sold to the highest bidder.
Read more: Google’s response to criticism: A game of cats and rats
If a business pays for a keyword, it means that your particular ad shows when someone searches for that word.
Through the use of Google’s own advertising system and other commercial tools, DN has been able to identify which keywords are involved.
An example is Swedish host Filip Hammar, who has been used in the bitcoin industry for several years and his name is a popular keyword that many sites pay for. Another presenter who appears in almost all fake Swedish advertisements is Fredrik Skavlan.
Filip Hammar has also been used in fake bitcoin advertisements. Your name is a popular keyword and appears on the list of what one of the companies has paid to appear alongside.
Photo: Alexander Mahmoud
When DN enters the Google advertising system and planning to place an ad with the keywords ‘Bitcoin Skavlan’, Google’s own system suggests that we can add ‘Filip Hammar Skavlan’ or ‘Filip Hammar Bitcoin Skavlan’. Our imaginary ad will appear when someone searches for these words, an obvious reference to fake celebrity ads.
Similarly, we see how the names of famous people are sold in various countries.
Among the sites DN reviews, there are also other examples of dubious keywords that Google was paid for, such as “how to make money quickly and easily as a kid” and various other similar references in English.
The Finixio company is based at this address. It is one of the companies that buys Google keyword ads on a large scale.
Photo: DN
One of the companies that on a large scale, Google’s keyword ad purchase is Finixio Ltd.
The company has its office on Lower Thames Street, next to London Bridge in central London. In two years, the company has grown from a start-up to 35 employees and a turnover of more than 150 million SEK, according to the company’s own information.
For a fee, Finixio sets up clients for financial companies that offer consumers risky currency speculation in bitcoin. The backbone of the business is a network of financial sites that review and rate these services online in different languages.
The notorious “Bitcoin Code” scam earns 5 stars from Finixio’s Swedish site.
But the ratings and reviews are paid for by the companies they review. Notorious bitcoin sites that authorities in various countries have warned about get high marks and are claimed to be safe and completely legal.
Among Finixio’s network of sites, there are several that are aimed at Swedes, but most are in English and German.
One of Finixio’s sites that was the largest in the fall of 2020 is called WealthAdvisor – the site indicates an address that goes to a pub in North London. It does not contain a company name, but the DN and OCCRP review shows that it is Finixio who is behind it.
This north London pub lists WealthAdvisor as the address.
Photo: DN
WealthAdvisor rates several sites that allow consumers to speculate in bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, but the ratings and reviews are bogus.
DN review shows that Google has received approximately SEK 70 million from WealthAdvisor since March for keywords and ads in Sweden, UK and Germany, among others.
With the help of the Semrush service, which is aimed at advertising agencies and advertising companies, Dagens Nyheter has been able to review the advertisements in detail. WealthAdvisor keywords include a clear link to fake celebrity ads.
In Sweden, for example, WealthAdvisor has paid for the keywords “Bitcoin Skavlan”, “Bitcoin Filip Hammar” and “Filip Hammar Bitcoin Skavlan”.
The database shows which keywords the site Wealtha went paid for.
Similarly, WealthAdvisor buys keywords in other countries. In the UK, these include the TV show Dragons Den and celebrities like business mogul Richard Branson and financial journalist Martin Lewis.
Semrush data shows that competition and prices for keywords linked to fake celebrity ads are higher than others. Some keywords cost up to $ 60 per ad click; Google sells them at the highest bid.
One of those brands The one that is most strongly traded against the Swedes is “Bitcoin Code”.
It is said to be a robot that automatically buys and sells bitcoins and other cryptocurrencies, but it is all a scam. Instead, users switch to financial companies offering risky speculations in cryptocurrencies.
In some cases, trading platforms are under the supervision of the authorities, for example in Cyprus. In other cases, they are completely deregulated and registered in infamous tax havens.
Some are pure scams that steal users’ money from the start, like the fraud factory in Kiev that DN revealed last spring.
The result is almost always the same: users lose all the money invested.
However, the fact that the authorities are warning against the Bitcoin Code does not prevent WealthAdvisor from making the following statement: “Is the Bitcoin Code legitimate? Yes, everything with the Bitcoin Code is legal and transparent ”.
WealthAdvisor claims that they tested the service and managed to triple the 250 euro bet in a few hours – Bitcoin Code gets the best rating: 5 stars and 9.8 in rating.
Similarly, a dozen other similar scam sites are rated highly and promise the services are legal.
According to information from, among others In a US criminal investigation linked to the Bitcoin Code, intermediaries like WealthAdvisor can receive a commission of between 2,500 and 4,000 SEK for each person who signs up and makes a first deposit.
When Dagens Nyheter, under a fictitious name, signs up with the Bitcoin Code scam site, it doesn’t take many minutes before the email from WealthAdvisor starts arriving.
The WealthAdvisor email that linked the DN reporter to a fake article.
In one of the emails, it is said that the British singer Adele made a fortune.
In another, it’s British soccer player Marcus Rashford, who allegedly got rich off his system.
Marcus Rashford, who plays for Manchester United and the English national team, has recently become something of a saint in the UK, where he led a campaign of free school lunches for poor children during the corona pandemic. The initiative led Queen Elizabeth II to award the 22-year-old footballer the Order of Knights MBE, Member of the Order of the British Empire.
WealthAdvisor uses Marcus Rashford’s fight for poor children in its advertisement: “From Free School Lunch to Helping Thousands Gain Financial Freedom!” it says in the email you receive DN.
The email contains an image of Marcus Rashford and the text links to a fake ad designed like a newspaper article, following the same pattern that Dagens Nyheter previously revealed. In the article, the DN reporter is linked to a financial company that the British Financial Supervisory Authority has warned about and which is not licensed.
The fake article that the WealthAdvisor email was linked to the DN reporter.
There are also many testimonials online from people claiming how they were misled by that company.
Finixios vd Adam Grunwerg admits in an email response to Dagens Nyheter that WealthAdvisor is the company’s site and claims that the celebrity email is a mistake and that management did not know about these emails.
– We have reached out to the group working on this to make sure it doesn’t happen again, writes Adam Grunwerg.
He claims that emails correspond to less than one percent of Finixio’s income.
– And the specific emails you mention correspond to less than one percent of the emails.
When asked by DN and OCCRP if Finixio runs the fake Bitcoin sites, like the Bitcoin Code the company links to, he admits that Finixio runs his own versions of these sites.
Finixios version av Bitcoin Code.
– Of course we do not run all the ones you can see in Google, there are thousands of them, he writes.
Adam Grunwerg claims that Finixio’s versions of bitcoin pages ship most clients to approved finance companies with the necessary licenses. But he says they don’t always have full control over where clients can end up.
– We also send traffic to networks that distribute the traffic more and we cannot always control who they are sent to, he writes.
