10 Most Disgraceful Influencer Scams of All Time

Edfluence

Jake Paul
It’s always nice when veterans can pass down tips to younger folks in the industry. However, Jake Paul went another route. In 2018, he released the online course Edfluence to teach people how to be an influencer and make a career online. To begin with, folks were charged $7. However, this paywall only gave access to one video full of very basic tips. To get more information, people needed to pay an additional $57 – but it turned out the rest of the videos were equally useless. Edfluence was shut down in 2020. Shortly after, Paul opened up “The Financial Freedom Movement,” which was essentially a rebrand of Edfluence, just far more expensive at $19.99 per month.

Scamming Romance

Mona Faiz Montrage
Also known as Mona 4Reall and Hajia4Reall, Mona Faiz Montrage is a Ghanaian influencer and hiplife musician. However, when she was in the U.K. in 2022, Montrage was arrested on suspicion of fraud. She was accused of running a group that targeted vulnerable older people with romance, only to steal vast sums of cash from them. It’s believed her operation had taken in over $2 million. In 2023, Montrage was extradited to the U.S. to face charges. The disgraced influencer pleaded guilty to conspiracy to handle stolen money. Montrage was sentenced to a year in jail and ordered to pay back the ill-gotten funds.

The Pandemic Relief Con

Danielle Miller
When COVID-19 hit in 2020, many governments set up financial relief funds to help small businesses cope with the lost income. Many people didn’t take advantage. But then there’s Danielle Miller. From July 2020 to May 2021, Miller stole the identities of 10 people and used them to apply for government benefits that totaled around $1.5 million. She then used the money to fund the luxurious lifestyle she promoted on social media, including chartering private planes and staying in expensive hotels. In 2023, while she was already serving a 5-year sentence for bank fraud in Florida, the self-described “con artist” was sentenced to another 5 years in Massachusetts.

Lymphoma Can Suck It

Amanda Riley
In 2012, while living in San Jose, California, Amanda Riley announced she had Stage 3 Hodgkin’s lymphoma. The Christian blogger soon set up the blog “Lymphoma Can Suck It,” where she detailed her battle with the disease with images of her in a hospital. On top of that, donation websites were created to help, bringing in over $100,000 and giving Riley the chance to meet celebrities. However, it was all a lie. In 2015, Riley’s friend Lisa Berry contacted investigative reporter Nancy Mosciatello with concerns about the illness being fake. In 2019, Riley was arrested for fraud, and in 2021, she pleaded guilty to the charges and received 5 years in jail, on top of paying restitution for the stolen cash.

$HAWK

Hawk Tuah
It’s weird the sort of things that can make a person famous. For Haliey Welch, it was popping up intoxicated in a YouTube video for Tim & Dee TV. There, she detailed how to make men happy with “hawk tuah,” earning her that nickname. From that, Welch became a viral star, creating a brand. However, like Icarus, she flew too close to the sun. In late 2024, Welch announced her cryptocurrency meme coin token, $HAWK. Within hours of its release, the coin’s market value shot up, then plummeted 90%, from $490 million to $60 million, later falling to $25 million. Investors lost all their money, sparking allegations it was all a scam and culminating in a lawsuit.

Teen Scheme

Kayla Massa
Armed with hundreds of thousands of followers across social media accounts, Kayla Massa started posting Instagram photos of stacks of cash and asking people to DM her if they wanted to make easy money. Preying primarily on her teen following, Massa was engaged in a complicated scam to deposit stolen money orders into their accounts, then withdraw the cash for herself before the banks discovered the fraud. When the marks realized what happened, Massa would block them. Altogether, Massa and her accomplices took in over $1.5 million before getting arrested in 2020. In 2025, Massa posted on a new Instagram account, since the last one was deleted, saying that she’d spent the previous 13 months in jail and was now under house arrest.

The Fake Lifestyle

Hushpuppi
Nigerian influencer Ramon Olorunwa Abbas, better known as Hushpuppi, was known for posting his lavish lifestyle on social media. Abbas claimed he made his cash as a real estate developer. But in reality, he was committing massive fraud. In 2019, he was part of a scheme to launder $14.7 million stolen by hackers at Malta’s Bank of Valletta, plunging the country into panic. Abbas also attempted to steal $124 million from an unnamed English Premier League football team. After his arrest, Abbas admitted his plan to launder over $300 million. In 2022, he was sentenced to 11 years in jail and had to pay $1.7 million in restitution.

Easter Eggs & Pandoro

Chiara Ferragni
With millions of followers on social media, Ferragni was one of Italy’s biggest influencers. She even had a Barbie designed after her. In 2022, Ferragni began selling pandoro, an Italian Christmas cake, claiming that sales would help fund research at the Regina Margherita Pediatric Hospital. Understandably, people believed that in buying the cakes, they were supporting the hospital. Previously, Ferragni had also sold Easter eggs that supposedly benefited a children’s charity. However, both of these were seemingly lies as neither organization received any money. In 2023, Ferragni was fined almost $1.2 million for the pandoro scandal, and in 2024 she agreed to pay nearly $1.3 million to a charity for the Easter eggs. She’s also facing criminal charges.

Model's Secret Life of Horror

Kat Torres
In addition to being a model, Brazilian Katiuscia Torres Soares, known as Kat Torres, ran an Instagram account that promoted self-help, much of which revolved around spiritualism. However, Torres wasn’t as humanitarian as she appeared. In reality, she was positioning herself as a cult leader and taking advantage of fellow Brazilians in need. Torres invited them to live with her in the U.S., but when they arrived, they were trafficked and turned into slaves under Torres’s control. The disappearance of two women led the FBI to get involved and eventually Torres was arrested. In 2024, she was sentenced to 8 years in prison.

Fake Cancer

Belle Gibson
In 2013, Australia’s Belle Gibson burst onto the influencer scene by releasing the nutrition mobile app The Whole Pantry. Even more impressive, Gibson supposedly did it while suffering from multiple cancers, which she detailed on social media. Gibson even stated she’d given hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity. However, all of it was a lie. Gibson didn’t have cancer, and she didn’t give money to charity. In 2015, after months of speculation and a growing mountain of evidence, she admitted her fraud in an interview with The Australian Women's Weekly. In 2017, she was fined around $311,000 USD for her fraud – which, of course, she has yet to pay.

Which of these scams left you shocked? Let us know below!