Forex and flash cars: the fight to keep ‘finfluencers’ in check

The University of Hull library had become 18-year-old Jakub Dziewirz's trading floor. Instead of essays about law, green and red lines flickered across his screen. His phone buzzed with messages on the Telegram app. Buy and sell signals – algorithms telling him when to exit or enter trades – had become his north star.

Dziewirz first came across foreign exchange trading, or forex, when a friend f rom Hull started posting on Instagram about making money on his phone. He was put in touch with a contact who went by @Jamie.tradesfx. When Jamie wasn’t draped across a Lamborghini, he was texting in a Rolex on cream leather carseats, or tensing his biceps in front of the Dubai skyline.

Dziewirz handed £350 to Jamie’s offshore broker and copied his trades via Telegram. Within a week, his investment had grown to £4,000. He rushed to tell his parents, who had migrated to the UK from Poland when he was six. “I’m going to be a rich forex trader,” he said, waving his phone as if it were a golden ticket.

Between buy and sell signals, the owners of these channels broadcast screenshots of alleged profits and forward jubilant messages from members. “Held on and wow that was a beautiful pump to the downside!” reads one, sent last week to a channel with over 40,000 subscribers, shared the day before.

He joined another trading channel, then another. Three became four, then five. He was soon spending four to six hours a day on the channels and, within a month, was depositing his student loan into offshore brokerages. “You’re constantly chasing that dopamine and the gamble,” he says. “I knew I was losing money. The more I’d lose, the more I’d risk.” Over 18 months, he estimates he netted £5,000 in losses.

“I got hooked on what most people get hooked on – the Lamborghini, the lifestyle, the ‘you can get rich’. Trading just seems like the easiest way to make money, especially for adults aged 18 to 25,” says Dziewirz.

Accounts like Jamie’s belong to a new class of creators known as “finfluencers”: social media personalities who use their platforms to promote financial products or share investment advice. Their audiences are vast, young, and reliant on them.

But most are not approved by the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) to sell investing advice, or promote unauthorised firms – potentially a criminal offence, although there is no suggestion that Jamie was acting illegally. On top of this, risk disclosures are rare. Citing a “significant increase” in finfluencers, in 2024, the FCA said it was cracking down and, in the next two years, it brought about 100 enforcement actions against finfluencers – 10 times the previous number.

Online, however, it’s business as usual. The FCA’s Warning List of unauthorised firms and individuals has been growing more rapidly. Of the 17,800 names listed over the past decade, almost a third have been added since 2024, and this year is on track to exceed all previous years. The list warns the public that they won’t be liable for compensation if they lose money with those firms. Being added to it is rarely enough to shut down offshore brokers or stop affiliates promoting them on social media. The FCA’s role is to ensure markets operate with integrity, but it does not moderate content on tech platforms. It is forced to engage in a game of cat and mouse, tracking usernames influencers adopt to avoid detection.

Finance content on TikTok posted by UK creators continues to be dominated by forex, crypto and trading, data from the platform’s creative centre shows. The most common finance-related hashtag, “#forex”, has appeared in about 80,000 posts over the last four months, while its popularity remains equal to pre-crackdown levels.

As content outpaces enforcement, the FCA is grappling with a new reality: a generation of investors gaining financial advice on tech platforms which lie outside the FCA’s control.

Almost half of gen Z investors in the UK use social media for investing information, according to the CFA Institute, treating finfluencer content as a “cost-effective and accessible substitute for professional advice”. A third of 25- to 34-year-olds in Britain are battling negative wealth, with debts that outweigh assets, according to the Fairness Foundation.

“It’s rough for young people leaving school who don’t know what to do,” says Cara Nicole, 29, a US-based YouTuber who blends money advice and pop culture. Framing topics such as buy now, pay later schemes and predatory car loans as if she’s gossiping with a friend, she has built a large following among viewers trying to make sense of their finances.

The CFA Institute found that a third of finfluencer content globally is promoting investment products, suggesting that, for many, trading feels like the only ladder available.

Monique Jones from north London was also 18 when she encountered forex content on Instagram. A relative, roughly her age, began posting trading charts alongside a suddenly lavish lifestyle. Her family member invited her to a Zoom call with around 100 others. The company, IM Academy, was selling subscriptions to a forex trading platform – free, if Jones brought in two referrals. Executives shared videos of themselves in flash cars. “They were selling a life of freedom – freedom of your time, freedom of your money,” she says.

Soon, every penny of her sub-£500 monthly income went on platform fees and trading. Each month, she netted a loss. At in-person meetings, she looked around the room and noticed a pattern. “Vulnerable people, people from disadvantaged backgrounds, young and impressionable people. It was almost as if they felt this was their only turning point.”

Finfluencers making trading content  earn money from monetising access to their trades. Most promote offshore brokers or exchanges through referral links – earning a sign-up bonus per trader, plus a cut of the revenue they generate for the broker, ranging from 20% to 60%, according to affiliate networks and brokerage sites. Others sell Telegram signal subscriptions, trading courses or mentorships, framed as a crash course to financial freedom.

A 2024 study by the University of Birmingham of more than 13,000 TikToks by UK finfluencers found the most common content to be about forex and crypto – yet just 2% of videos disclosed any risk. When they did, says co-author Dr Essam Gaddafi, it made no difference to engagement.

“Popularity is used as a measure for trust, rather than the credibility or qualification of the person giving the advice,” he says.

Harrison Sullivan – “HStikkytokky” – has been on the warning list since 2024. The 24-year-old, who lives between Spain and Dubai and featured prominently in the recent Louis Theroux documentary Inside the Manosphere, now runs a Telegram channel under a new name, sharing daily signals with 90,000 members. Love Island's Jonny Mitchell has accumulated nine separate social media handles on his FCA warning, last updated just weeks ago; on his current Telegram channel, signals fire as usual to 40,000 members. All mention of forex has been scrubbed from his Instagram. Above images of private jets and yachts – a holiday that never ends – his bio simply reads: “investor”.

The FCA has taken just 12 criminal actions against finfluencers to date. Last month, seven reality TV personalities, with a combined 4.5m Instagram followers, were fined a total of £7,000 for promoting an unauthorised forex trading scheme. Despite the regulator issuing 650 takedown requests to social media companies, platforms have done little systematically in response. Meta, YouTube and TikTok face limited liability so long as they respond to complaints rather than proactively policing their platforms – leaving little incentive to act against content that drives clicks.

“Social media platforms must step up and be more proactive in identifying and removing unlawful content before it reaches UK consumers,” an FCA spokesperson said.

Both Jones and Dziewirz quit forex signals after roughly 18 months, each ending up poorer than before. Over the years that followed, they taught themselves – slowly, using free online resources – how to save and invest properly. Now 26 and 25 respectively, they have both become finfluencers, posting about the perils of get-rich-quick schemes to the audiences who might once have been them.

In a clip with over 5m views, Dziewirz reveals that an offshore brokerage promoted to UK traders is registered to a KFC in Bermuda. Jones explains concepts like the S&P 500 to her 175,000 followers and shares practical saving tips. Neither is getting rich from it.

Last year, the Federal Trade Commission ruled that IM Academy had caused more than $1.2bn in consumer harm since 2018. Three of the key figures behind the alleged multi-level marketing scheme paid millions to settle charges.

Following an FCA warning against @Jamie.tradesFX, his signals went dark. Dziewirz sometimes sees him around Hull.

Photographs by tradewithjamiefx