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My recently deceased good friend, the filmmaker Peeter Simm, who had himself studied at Nõo school, used to listen all the time to what in my language are so-called old Jewish men’s talks. They were mostly from YouTube, but also from other internet sources: opinion leaders who look authoritative at first sight. Peeter was an older person. Naturally he recommended that I too listen to these seemingly wise men. As much as I started listening to them — certainly not all of them — there was always some faint so-called error. For me these sources were not trustworthy. Peeter, as an older person, did not sense or notice this difference between sources. At first I tried to draw his attention to it. At some point I gave up. Since then I have noticed that slightly dubious, illogical positions on the internet are becoming more and more believable, and more and more of my smart acquaintances find them believable and worth considering.

Today, during my morning browse of Äripäev, I noticed for the first time a story on this topic in the Estonian media that seemed trustworthy at first sight. I loaded the PDF of the article into the Claude AI application on my desk, which is still working, and tried to formulate a question. The link to the article and Claude’s answer, which I find logical, are below.

Link to the article

Äripäev’s story “Noored investorid langevad finfluencer’ite mõjutuste küüsi” (“Young investors fall prey to the influence of finfluencers”, 21.06.2026):

https://www.aripaev.ee/uudised/2026/06/21/noored-investorid-langevad-finfluencerite-mojutuste-kuusi

What the search for the source revealed

Äripäev’s story is a translation/adaptation of a text whose original source is a Financial Times (FT) article from August 2024 about financial influencers (finfluencers). Äripäev’s own text already shows this: Dimos “admits frankly to the Financial Times”. But the interesting thing is that I could not find a clean, directly linkable ft.com address on the web — the FT article is behind a paywall and poorly visible to search engines.

What, by contrast, circulates freely and matches Äripäev’s story word for word (the same names, the same quotes, the same structure) is a reprint in Global Financial Market Review:

https://www.gfmreview.com/breaking/the-rise-of-financial-influencers-gen-z-s-risky-path-to-wealth

And here comes the first catch. This reprint (22.08.2024) carries the name Brett Hurll as author — not the name of the FT journalist. The original source has disappeared, replaced by another publication’s other author name, with no reference back to the FT. Äripäev in turn gives Alice Veedla (translator/editor) as author. The same story, three author names, zero direct links to the original.

The honest conclusion: I cannot confirm the exact FT link (it could be searched for in the FT’s own archive with the keywords “Blockchain Boy finfluencers”, if you have FT access). But a freely readable identical text is at the GFM Review address above. The chain of sources itself is blurred — and that is the very point of the story.

The problem in brief

Young investors fall under the influence of financial influencers who sell crypto, forex and CFDs (contracts for difference — highly leveraged bets on price movements) as a fast way to get rich. The typical character is the hustle bro — a young guru who shows off Lamborghinis, private jets and monthly courses costing up to 150 pounds, promising escape from the “9-to-5 trap”. The real picture is the opposite: according to a Barclays study, 42% of people who invested on the basis of social media advice lost money.

The history of the problem

• 2020–21 (the pandemic): explosive growth. Brokerage apps, boredom, zero interest rates and the crypto boom brought millions of beginners to the market. The term finfluencer became widely known.
• 2021–23: regulators wake up. The British financial regulator FCA starts issuing warnings; the number of ads removed was ~600 in 2021, 8,600 in 2022 and more than 10,000 in 2023.
• 2024: the FT article and the FCA charges. In June the FCA charged nine influencers (including reality stars) with giving unauthorised CFD advice.
• 2025–26: internationally coordinated pressure. The regulators of the UK, Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Italy and the UAE carried out a joint action — arrests, ~650 account removal requests, dozens of sites shut down. The problem has shifted from simple “bad advice” towards organised crime: victims are lured into encrypted Telegram/Signal groups where fake “signals” are shared and money is directed to unregulated offshore brokers.

A persistent conflict: in the EU professional financial advice requires a licence, but general “financial education” does not — and the line between the two is blurred, which influencers exploit with disclaimers. Fragmented jurisdictions such as Dubai remain beyond the reach of supervision.

The general picture in 2026 — uncontrolled sources and common sense

Your observation touches on something deeper than just financial influencers. Look at what happened with this very story. The FT writes the story → an aggregator copies it and puts its own author name on it → Äripäev translates it (from the FT or the aggregator, we do not know) → you read it as a PDF. At each step a little verifiability is lost. Instead of reading one verifiable original source, we read a copy of a copy whose origin we can no longer trace. And this is still a quality example — Äripäev is a trustworthy publication. Think what happens where there is no original source at all.

The irony is complete: the story is about people who trust an unverified source (a TikTok guru) that they cannot verify — and we ourselves consume this story through a chain whose original source we cannot verify. The form repeats the content.

Your “elementary knowledge and logic” have not actually gone anywhere — they are simply not called upon, because the system is designed to avoid it. A short video, a quick emotion, certainty in the author’s voice. Common sense needs a pause — “wait, is this true?” — and it is precisely this pause that the feed erases. The same goes for Peeter’s “wise men”: a smooth presentation and an authoritative tone take effect before logic gets a word in.

The elementary logic that every such story should trigger is actually very simple and old:

1. Cui bono? If someone knows a sure way to get rich, why does he sell it to you for 150 € a month instead of trading himself? The answer is in his business model, not in his advice — the product is not the return, the product is you.
2. Risk and return are inseparable. At the bottom of the same page that invites you to “copy trades” it says: 80% of retail investors lose money with CFDs. The information is there — just in the wrong font size.
3. Survivorship bias. You see those who pose with a Lambo. You do not see those who lost — they do not make videos.
4. Check the source, not the form. A smooth presentation does not equal true content. In the age of AI the form becomes ever smoother and the source ever harder to trace.

This is not a new problem — scams are ancient — but in 2026 two things have been amplified: the frictionlessness of distribution (one video, a million people, in a second) and the decoupling of authority from content. In the old days “the Financial Times writes” meant something, because you had a specific publication in mind. Now “the FT writes” can reach you through three hands, none of which is the FT. The only serious answer is financial literacy in a broader sense — critical thinking, calling on common sense by hand, because it no longer kicks in automatically.