Jamel Debbouze arrested, Elise Lucet beaten... What these recent “revelations” about French personalities hide

Fake news is currently circulating about French personalities like Elise Lucet and Jamel Debbouze. Behind these lies a real financial scam system.

A performance by Elise Lucet "which turns into a tragedy", Jamel Debbouze "taken to court"... Many surprising revelations about French personalities have been circulating on the Internet since the beginning of March. They come from false press articles using outrageous titles and a layout reminiscent of the biggest names in the French press. To attract clicks, statements or incidents are invented from scratch concerning personalities well known to the French such as Elise Lucet, Jamel Debbouze, but also Yann Barthès. The fake news is accompanied by hard-hitting visuals that are actually montages. For example, the image that shows Jamel Debbouze handcuffed by Australian police is a purported photo of a protester in Sydney, arrested during an anti-lockdown rally.

Once the Internet user has clicked on the link, he arrives at a false article in Le Monde which assures that Jamel Debbouze was “sued in court by the Bank of France”. Elise Lucet, for her part, appears with a swollen face in an article explaining that she "said goodbye to her ordinary life", or that her show the day before "ended in tragedy". Obviously, none of these events happened to either the comedian or the journalist. The aim of the scam is only to make the reader ultimately believe that they can earn money and to send it to foreign platforms for automatic resale of cryptocurrencies, promising immediate gains.

Elise Lucet herself warned against this “coordinated campaign of malicious posts” using her image. France 2 and the newspaper Le Monde have decided to file a complaint against the authors of these false advertisements, according to Huffpost.

Yann Barthès was also affected by this scam with messages like “Yann was stunned to see the profit he made after buying Bitcoins on the Big Money Rush trading platform”. Sponsored content is thus inserted.

These misleading campaigns circulate in particular on very popular social networks such as those of Meta or X, formerly Twitter. They are shared by labeled accounts for a fee, a functionality implemented by Elon Musk after the purchase of the platform, which offers better visibility to these accounts. Previously, the label, or the "blue checkmark" as historic Twitter users call it, certified an account as official or in any case serious. But that was before.