{"id":675273,"date":"2026-09-06T12:01:14","date_gmt":"2026-09-06T12:01:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/675273\/"},"modified":"2026-09-06T12:01:14","modified_gmt":"2026-09-06T12:01:14","slug":"a-strange-article-about-glen-hansard-led-me-to-the-promise-of-e500k-before-it-disappeared","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/675273\/","title":{"rendered":"A strange article about Glen Hansard led me to the promise of \u20ac500k before it disappeared"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/p>\n

\n Stephen McDermott<\/p>\n

IF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was still shuffling around on this mortal coil in 2026, he might have named three certainties in life: death, taxes and the proliferation of fake celebrity endorsement scams on social media.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve probably spotted these popping up as fake news articles or deepfake videos in which celebrities encourage people to invest money on a supposedly foolproof trading platform.<\/p>\n

They usually appear as eye-catching posts with clickbait headlines, in which the celebrity appears to be making some mysterious revelation that will eventually lure readers towards handing over their savings.<\/p>\n

The Irish versions have featured a diverse cast that includes names like\u00a0Miriam O\u2019Callaghan, David McWilliams, Doireann Garrihy,\u00a0Leo Varadkar, Michael O\u2019Leary and Brendan Gleeson.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s basically a new barometer of fame if your face has been stolen for one of these things.<\/p>\n

But the latest version of the hoax that I encountered this week developed the scam in a way I hadn\u2019t seen before. The famous person whose face had been used was dead.<\/p>\n

That celebrity was Glen Hansard, whose death in a motorbike crash at the end of July prompted a huge outpouring of tributes in Ireland and abroad.<\/p>\n

The scam, which I saw in a post on X, was similar to a lot of the others I\u2019d seen before.<\/p>\n

It linked to a website made to look like an Irish Independent article, but instead of Hansard endorsing an investment, it leaned into his untimely death by claiming that his partner had discovered a folder among his belongings containing a secret letter.<\/p>\n

The letter supposedly contained a bank statement and details of an investment platform that had earned him almost \u20ac500,000.<\/p>\n

The fake article contained the usual hallmarks of these scams: an emotional story, fabricated quotes (attributed to his widow Maire Saaritsa), the use of the Irish Independent\u2019s graphics and font, and an editor\u2019s note \u2018confirming\u2019 that the newspaper had \u2018verified\u2019 the investment as legitimate.<\/p>\n

\"download\"
\n The AI-generated image in the scam post I saw this week\n<\/p>\n

The fact that scammers are ruthless enough to use the name and image of a recently deceased celebrity to con people out of money isn\u2019t exactly surprising.<\/p>\n

These types of hoaxes have been around so long that the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission has already issued a public warning about them<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Part of the design of these things is to dress a financial proposition in the clothes of a story people have already spent 10 minutes reading.<\/p>\n

By the time the reader reaches the money bit, they\u2019ve already been softened up by morbid curiosity and the supposed credibility of a fake piece of journalism.<\/p>\n

But the Glen Hansard edition is a particularly grim development for several reasons.<\/p>\n

Unlike other fake endorsements, Hansard isn\u2019t around to debunk it or sue social media platforms to stop them from hosting these posts (as people like Miche\u00e1l Martin and Denis O\u2019Brien have done); instead, that responsibility will likely fall to his grieving partner.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also an example of how scammers are leaning into public awareness of their actions \u2013 through warnings like the CCPC\u2019s \u2013 and effectively short-circuiting it by factoring in an additional level of persuasion.<\/p>\n

In the \u2018article\u2019 I saw this week, there\u2019s a fabricated comment section at the bottom in which a man complains that the claims look like a scam, with a reply from a woman who reassures him by saying \u201cI put a little in; I got more back; therefore it\u2019s safe\u201d.<\/p>\n

That might seem ludicrous to some people, but even that small detail acts as a kind of a filtering system.<\/p>\n

Think about how many times you\u2019ve come across something similar and laughed at how implausible it is.<\/p>\n

In a 2012 paper<\/a>, Microsoft researcher Cormac Herley argued that scammers who run these sorts of operations want to avoid wasting precious time on people who\u2019ll cop what\u2019s going on and walk away.<\/p>\n

So asking \u201cwho would ever believe this?\u201d might be missing the point, and stop victims from asking for help or reporting the fraud in case they\u2019re made to feel stupid.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s another reason the fake comments are worth dwelling on.<\/p>\n

Most of the advice about avoiding online scams urges people to carry out basic checks to verify what they\u2019re seeing.<\/p>\n

If someone asked me how to figure out whether the Glen Hansard scam was fake, I\u2019d tell them to search online, to check if a verified news outlet was carrying the story about his secret letter, or see if other people had similar experiences \u2013 like others who had supposedly made similar investments in the past.<\/p>\n

The problem here is that there are so many layers built in that anticipate those verification checks, from the use of the Irish Independent\u2019s livery and font, to the editor\u2019s note and the reassuring comment at the bottom of the fake article.<\/p>\n

In that sense, the scam has already got ahead of careful users who might think twice and search, read the comments, look for a legitimate news source, and check for reassurance.<\/p>\n

The use of Glen Hansard as the face of the scam also gives the fraudsters a convenient explanation for the secretive nature of his supposedly lucrative investment.<\/p>\n

They can plausibly suggest that he wanted to keep his windfall private, and that his partner supposedly made the discovery only while going through his belongings.<\/p>\n

And again, the singer can\u2019t confirm or deny any of this because he\u2019s dead.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, I couldn\u2019t do any digging on who may have been behind the scam or report it to X or anyone else because the post and article both disappeared a day after I saved the links to both.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s another feature of the online scam economy, where hoaxes can look believable for a short time and vanish before any scrutiny can be applied.<\/p>\n

Those responsible were not nearly as interested in leaving traces of themselves.<\/p>\n

And given how the methods of online scammers have evolved in recent years, it likely means we\u2019ve entered an era where even the dead are seen as fair game to con people out of money.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Stephen McDermott IF BENJAMIN FRANKLIN was still shuffling around on this mortal coil in 2026, he might have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675274,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[75],"tags":[285543,192249,18,117,129992,19,192250,17,12314,1114,879],"class_list":["post-675273","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-celebrity-scams","tag-diary-of-a-man-on-the-internet","tag-eire","tag-entertainment","tag-glen-hansard","tag-ie","tag-internet-diaries","tag-ireland","tag-scams","tag-social-media","tag-x"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117223994497806256","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675273","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675273"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675273\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675274"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675273"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675273"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675273"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}