Why Russian gangs are behind the bizarre adverts featuring AI images of Nigel Farage and Andrew Bailey that are taking over X feeds and promoting a get-rich-quick scam

By TOM LEONARD, US CORRESPONDENT Published: 12:38, 5 July 2026 | Updated: 12:58, 5 July 2026 It's no secret that emotions can run high on BBC1's Question Time as political opponents lock horns with each other and audience members over the topical issues of the day. However, nothing has come close to matching the violence that erupted in the Question Time studio between Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and Andrew Bailey, the Governor of the Bank of England, in a recent episode. Photos of Farage throwing water at the man from the Bank, kicking him up the backside, knocking off his glasses and even pulling a gun on him as presenter Fiona Bruce watched on in horror, electrified social media this week. For British users on X, the Elon Musk-owned social media platform, it was impossible to avoid seeing the exchange. They were everywhere, turning up in various iterations, from different accounts, again and again.  Each was accompanied by variations on a clickbait caption: 'This topic raises a lot of questions.' 'Nobody Expected This.' 'What happened?' What was happening? It was surely clear to all but the most gullible social media user that the pictures were fake – that Farage had not let his admittedly myriad economic differences with Bailey boil over into violence on the BBC's most famous panel show. These images were indeed AI-generated. And, although the pictures looked realistic enough, there were various fairly obvious inconsistencies – the unlikely presence of police officers in the BBC studio to separate the pair as soon as they started fighting and the fact that, in some of the images, the pair were either sitting entirely alone at the Question Time desk. And why did Farage have a heavily bruised face in some pictures and Bailey in others? An AI-generated image shows Reform UK leader Nigel Farage throwing water over Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey in the Question Time studio  Beyond the fact that, in the top right corner of each of these X posts was the word 'Ad' (meaning that it was a paid advert), there was another big giveaway that this was not what it seemed.  If X users pressed the 'play' symbol in the centre of each image, they didn't – as one might expect – launch a video of the Question Time drama but instead a bogus BBC News website appeared, reporting on other aspects of the supposed confrontation. Under the headline '"You're lying to millions of working Britons": How Nigel Farage exposed the Bank of England's elite secret on live television', it provided a colourful report of how Farage had trounced Bailey in a Question Time argument, in which the studio audience had burst into spontaneous applause as he accused the governor and his 'City mates' of making vast sums while keeping working people in 'permanent servitude'. Aside from the implausibility of a Lefty BBC audience ever applauding Farage for anything, there were signs here too that the 'news site' was a fake.  The font was different from the one the Beeb uses and one of the 'trending news stories' running down the side claimed that the US was about to execute its first prisoner by nitrogen gas – when sharp-eyed readers would have noticed that this happened in January 2024. By now, some tech-savvy readers might have concluded they had been drawn into an elaborate – if crude – political propaganda operation. Russia, in particular, has been accused of using social media in this way, especially since the start of the Ukraine conflict. However, the hoaxers had other intentions. The 'news story' went on to claim that Farage had mentioned on Question Time that an 'AI-powered' investment company called Garlenix would guarantee cash-strapped British people extraordinary returns on investments. And lo and behold, the spoof BBC page provided a link to Garlenix which, despite its professional-looking website and various claims to authenticity, was yet another fake in this string of deceptions. The Daily Mail has discovered that Garlenix was set up last month. Despite multiple reports on the AI adverts, it has never been mentioned anywhere else online. It brandishes myriad glowing customer testimonials from the review website Trustpilot which, of course, are entirely fabricated. Fake images emerged of Farage kicking Bailey up the backside, knocking off his glasses and even pulling a gun on him as presenter Fiona Bruce watched on in horror Using such tried-and-tested scammer methods such as a countdown claiming that 'registration closes within 24 hours' and another ticker showing how many other people are 'viewing this page right now', punters are directed towards an offshore and unregulated payment platform to make an initial investment of £250. This, they are assured, will become thousands of pounds within weeks, making a 150 per cent return on their investment in just 12 months. It remains unclear how many people have fallen for this fraud but it is so prevalent on social media – especially on X, whose owner, Elon Musk, has been accused of jeopardising user safety by slashing staff numbers – that it must be a profitable revenue stream. After all, it now costs pennies to create AI images and disseminate them online – so only a tiny fraction of the people who may have seen the adverts need actually progress right through to giving money to Garlenix to make a profit for the criminals. But which criminals precisely? Picking up on various clues, cyber-security experts Bitdefender tell the Daily Mail that they strongly believe the perpetrators are Russian. The company, which is adept at exposing online scams, uncovered a very similar operation on Facebook in February this year, describing it as a 'sprawling global scam infrastructure' and 'disinformation-for-profit network'. Stretching across at least 25 countries on six continents and involving 310 coordinated scam campaigns, it used 'trusted news brands, real personalities, fabricated media narratives, emotional hooks, and advanced evasion techniques to drive victims into investment fraud funnels'. Tellingly, the report, published back in March, included the same fake BBC news story about the Farage-Bailey confrontation on Question Time that appeared in this week's X campaign (This time, the spurious AI investment platform was not called Garlenix but Albion Credmere.) Just as the arrival of social media leviathans with huge user numbers (X has more than 250million daily users while Facebook boasts over two billion) has drastically increased the potential reach of financial scams, so the advent of accessible AI technology has turbocharged criminals' ability to grab people's attention, say experts. Although the pictures looked realistic, there were obvious inconsistencies – like the unlikely presence of police officers in the BBC studio to separate the pair after they started fighting Surreal though it sounds, fictitious live TV confrontations in which a central bank boss was 'exposed' and stormed off set (as happened in the fake Andrew Bailey drama) were the most widespread scenario in these scams, says Bitdefender. Using a 'shared playbook', the hoaxers created similar 'fake news' for 12 other European countries as well as Australia and Turkey. In France, for example, the scammers manufactured a spat – reported on a fake news site – involving European Central Bank president Christine Lagarde, broadcaster and outspoken Right-wing French politician and writer. Other favourite scenarios for the scammers involved the revelation of a celebrity's 'secret will' or inheritance providing new financial opportunities, and a politician being exposed in some scandal 'to trigger outrage'. The fraud itself also follows a similar pattern. Social media users see a 'sponsored post' (essentially an advert) which points to what appears to be a trusted site. There, a fake news article or 'dramatic' narrative 'pushes' them to register their name, phone number and email address with a 'trading platform'. Once a user hands over their personal details, the 'investment pressure' begins. If the user hasn't already deposited a minimum amount – in the process revealing their bank details – a 'broker' will soon ring up, sometimes within minutes, to chivvy them along. A fake online dashboard shows fabricated early 'profits', encouraging the hapless victim to invest more. Withdrawing any money becomes impossible. The scam doesn't just trick people into making bogus investments but also harvests their personal data for future frauds and employs 'malvertising' (malicious advertising) techniques to spread 'malware', allowing fraudsters to steal data and hijack computer systems. The 'news story' went on to claim that Farage had mentioned on Question Time that an 'AI-powered' investment company called Garlenix would guarantee cash-strapped British people extraordinary returns on investments Garlenix, despite its professional-looking website and various claims to authenticity, was yet another fake in this string of deceptions While the scammers went to some efforts to bypass the automatic controls set up by platforms like Facebook and X to weed out such malicious adverts, they failed to hide all the Russian connections that would have sounded alarm bells with the social media companies, said Bitdefender. Delving into the inner workings of the scam, its researchers found 'observable signals of a Russian-speaking operator' including a string of verbatim Russian Cyrillic words and phrases. The Putin regime has been blamed for all manner of online subversion, from trying to influence the outcome of the US presidential election by spreading fake news stories on Facebook, to manipulating social media algorithms to advance Kremlin-approved views. Although stoking political antagonism in countries like Britain has certainly been part of the Russian game plan, Bitdefender, a multi-national company based in Romania and Texas, said there was no evidence that this was a state-sponsored scam. 'Based on the evidence we analysed, this campaign looks like a financially-motivated cybercrime operation, not a politically-motivated action,' Bogdan Botezatu, Bitdefender's Senior Director of Threat Research & Reporting, told the Daily Mail. 'Political themes are used because they work as emotional bait: cyber-criminals know that if they put a central banker, a politician, or a public figure into a fake scandal, people are more likely to click. That can create political noise as a side effect, but in this case the business model appears to be fraud first.' This week, moderators on X seemed eventually to get a handle on the situation, shutting down offending accounts. But then it started all over again as the same scam popped up on new accounts, this time with different AI photos of Farage and Bailey shaking hands and walking down a street together. Conservative MP George Freeman, a former technology minister, is campaigning to criminalise the spreading of malicious AI-generated content after featuring in one wrongly claiming he was defecting to Reform. 'This serves as yet another illustration of the potential for AI technology to undermine our trust and faith with what we see online,' he told the Daily Mail this week. 'One fake site is shut down and yet another appears. It seems that social media platforms are struggling to oversee or regulate their content – either they lack concern or they have lost control, which is deeply concerning on both fronts.' Experts say that tech companies must do more to root out the scams while consumers must discourage them by better protecting their online private information and installing software that warns them of danger. Certainly something had better change if misinformation isn't to become the norm, not the exception, on social media – as this week's bizarre saga has demonstrated. The comments below have not been moderated. The views expressed in the contents above are those of our users and do not necessarily reflect the views of MailOnline. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. To do this we will link your MailOnline account with your Facebook account. We’ll ask you to confirm this for your first post to Facebook. You can choose on each post whether you would like it to be posted to Facebook. Your details from Facebook will be used to provide you with tailored content, marketing and ads in line with our Privacy Policy.