735,000 UK Teens Spent £55.5m Chasing Get-Rich-Quick Schemes On Social Media

Another day, another dire statistic from social media. Freetrade, the investment app owned by IG found that more than 735,000 UK teenagers have spent an estimated £55.5 million trying to copy “get rich quick” content they have seen online.

Freetrade surveyed 1,000 teenagers and 1,000 parents through OnePoll and found that 34% of teenagers had encountered social media content promising to make them rich quickly. Of those, 37% had subsequently spent their own money trying to replicate what they had seen, spending an average of £75.50 over the previous year.

Of the teenagers who had encountered get-rich-quick content, 88% said they saw it a few times a week or more.

This does not surprise me. Get-rich scams are rife on social media, and one thing that social algorithms love is engagement and curiosity. Couple that with the naivety of youth, and your children’s feeds are going to be awash with this sort of aspirational lifestyle fakery.

What is even more alarming is that get-rich social content is not limited to petty scams selling courses or dodgy off-shore trading platforms. It can lead to seemingly innocent victims being hoodwinked into money laundering for criminals.

If you are a parent and want to be terrified by what your children could be seeing online, there is an excellent book you should read by Geoff White, called Rinsed: From Cartels to Crypto: How the Tech Industry Washes Money for the World’s Deadliest Crooks

I was lucky enough to hear Geoff speak at a conference recently, where he recounted the story of a student called Kenoly Ugbodu, who in 2017, was approached on Snapchat and offered money to let one of his followers use his bank account.

Ugbodu’s account then received €91,000 stolen through an invoice redirection scam. Ugbodu was taken from Cork to Dublin and instructed to withdraw €65,000 through 30 transactions, while another €10,000 was spent on phones. Police traced him through his bank account. Kenoly admitted his involvement and ultimately received a fully suspended two-year prison sentence.

After hearing that, I went home and immediately had some stern chats with my children about the dangers of getting sucked in online.

Any parent should do the same. Because the dangers of get-rich-quick scams are more prevelant than you think and social media networks favour profit over protection.

Our 2025 research found that over £51m was lost to financial scams in 2024.

What is the fastest way to wealth?

The fastest way to get rich is to slow down as unfortunately, despite what social media and WhatsApp scammers will tell you, there is no reliable formula for getting rich quickly.

I’m afraid becoming wealthy is generally boring and involves a combination of earning more, owning assets and taking calculated risks to invest, rather than save.

Investing in shares, property or other productive assets can also build wealth, but usually over years rather than weeks. The more risk you take, the greater your potential returns, but also the greater chance of loss.

There is a big difference between something that can make you rich quickly and something that can reliably make you rich quickly. The latter is extremely rare.

Get-Rich-Quick Red Flags

The most obvious red flag is that if it looks too good to be true, it probably is.

Be particularly cautious of financial content promising guaranteed returns, secret strategies or huge profits with little effort.

Other red flags include screenshots of extraordinary trading profits without independently verifiable evidence, expensive courses claiming to reveal a “system”, pressure to act immediately and influencers making more money from selling advice than from the strategy they are promoting.

High-risk trading, cryptocurrencies and leveraged products can produce large gains quickly, but they can also produce equally rapid losses.

Never, ever engage with someone who has contacted you through social media or message platforms like WhatsApp or Telegram.

What is the “Fast Myth”?

The “Fast Myth” is the idea that because somebody became wealthy quickly, there must be a repeatable shortcut others can follow.

Social media makes this particularly powerful because people see the winner but rarely the hundreds or thousands of people who attempted the same thing and failed.

A trader turning £1,000 into £100,000 makes an interesting video. Thousands of traders losing their £1,000 do not.

The truth is that traders posturing on social media about making millions will have made their money by referring new customers to brokers and being paid a sign-up bonus for each person they refer, as opposed to executing profitable trades.

Unfortunately, the social media platforms are complicit here too, as even the FCA (the UK Financial Conduct Authority) cannot force networks to remove scam ads.

Why you can’t get-rich-quick

The most important element in building wealth is time. The longer you are invested, the greater chance you have of seeing your money grow.

Try our investing returns calculator to see what a difference a few years makes to your overall portfolio value.

If you’re a parent reading this, try our Junior ISA calculator to see what a difference starting to invest early for your children can make too.

If a genuinely simple, low-risk opportunity consistently generated enormous returns, investors would quickly exploit it and the opportunity would disappear.

This is why promises combining high returns, low risk and very little effort should immediately be treated with scepticism.

How you can actually get rich

The good news is that Freetrade’s research shows that many teenagers are already interested in making money. Almost a third (31%) have sold old clothes online, while 18% have a business idea they believe could make serious money.

The more people understand money, the more confident they become in sorting out their finances and the more likely they are to form good money habits in the long run.

Building sustainable wealth comes from a mixture of long-term diversified investing, building a business or career, increasing income and consistently saving part of what they earn.

Even small income boosts matter. Selling unwanted items, freelancing, learning a valuable skill or starting a small side business can create additional money that can then be saved or invested.

The problem is that that does not make a very exciting TikTok video, but getting rich slowly remains a considerably more reliable strategy than trying to get rich quick.

Freetrade’s get rich quick key findings

• 34% of UK teenagers have seen social media content promising to help them “get rich quick”.
• Of those exposed to it, 37% spent their own money trying to copy what they had seen.
• Freetrade estimates this equates to more than 735,000 UK teenagers.
• Collectively, they are estimated to have spent over £55.5 million, averaging £75.50 each over the past year.
• 88% of those seeing get-rich-quick content encounter it a few times a week or more.
• 47% of teenagers have seen content about side hustles, making it the most commonly encountered type of financial content in the survey.
• Only 20% said they had encountered trustworthy investing advice.
• 31% of teenagers have sold old clothes online.
• 18% have a business idea they believe could make them serious money one day.
• Only 14% of parents feel very confident judging whether financial content their children see online is trustworthy.
• 31% of parents don’t feel confident at all about assessing the trustworthiness of online financial content.
• The research surveyed 1,000 UK teenagers aged 13–19 and 1,000 parents, with the results weighted against ONS population data.

Duncan Ferris, Investment Writer, Freetrade, said:

“Teenagers wanting more money to spend is not a new phenomenon, but in the digital age this youthful enthusiasm can be exploited online and lead to damaging financial decisions.

“The challenge for parents is finding an engaging way to educate their children about money. When digital con artists offer eye-catching videos and promises of fast cash, a lengthy parental lecture about financial prudence might not be the best way to compete for teens’ attention.

“Rather than talking to teenagers about saving and investing in the abstract, it might be far more effective to offer a practical demonstration with a Junior Stocks and Shares ISA. Adding even a small amount to an account, perhaps as a gift for your child’s future, could get your teen invested in investing.

“When it comes to investing, children have the advantage of time on their side, which means more opportunity to compound and weather market ups and downs. That means a practical demonstration with a Junior ISA can help them to build a financial headstart, as well as getting them engaged and learning about healthy attitudes to investing and personal finances.”