Quantum AI

Elon Musk never launched a crypto trading platform called Quantum AI. Neither did British finance broadcaster Martin Lewis, former UK prime ministers Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, David Beckham, Richard Branson, Indian businesswoman Sudha Murty, or Australian mining billionaire Andrew Forrest — every one of them has had an AI-generated version of themselves promoting exactly this platform, and none of them agreed to it.

Three national regulators have now warned against the name. Hong Kong's Securities and Futures Commission did so in May 2024, asking police to block the sites and social pages promoting it. The Central Bank of Ireland issued its own warning notice in December 2024. The UK's Financial Conduct Authority added Quantum AI to its register of unauthorised firms on 14 May 2025 and updated that entry on 3 March 2026, naming quantumai.co and quantumai.co.com as its websites. Australia's Scamwatch has separately flagged the same pattern. This isn't one company with one office you could visit even if you wanted to — that's a large part of why it has run for years.

What the ads promise#

The pitch is always the same shape: an AI-powered trading bot that turns a small deposit into daily profit "even while you sleep," fronted by a deepfaked interview or news segment of a recognisable public figure "revealing" the platform. The videos are built from real footage — a genuine interview or broadcast — with the audio and lip movement replaced. Some versions of the campaign go a layer further, building spoofed pages copying the look of the BBC, CNN, or DW News to run a fake "exclusive" article as supporting evidence before the ad even links to the platform itself.

What regulators found#

Beyond the official warnings above, researchers tracking the wider campaign have identified more than 15,500 domains sharing the same cloaking infrastructure, used to hide the scam pages from security scanners while still routing real visitors through — which is why removing one domain barely slows the campaign; several more are already live under near-identical names, including variants such as quantumai-ch.com. One reported UK victim described losing £75,000 to a deepfake advert built around Martin Lewis's likeness.

One name, five entries on one register#

Search the FCA's register for "Quantum AI" and you do not get one record. You get five separate unauthorised-firm entries, each opened against a different arrangement of the same three words:

• Quantum AI
• Quantum AI Miners
• Quantum Asset AI
• Quantum Open AI
• quantum-trading-ai.net

That is what this operation looks like from the regulator's side of the desk. Each time a name is burned the next one costs nothing to invent, and the register grows another line. Checked on 28 September 2026.

A deepfake doesn't need to survive close inspection. It only needs to survive the few seconds someone spends deciding whether to keep scrolling.

Why this particular shape matters#

Quantum AI isn't really one platform — it's a name, a pitch, and a production pipeline for fake endorsement videos, redeployed under near-identical branding every time a domain gets blocked. That's why a regulator flagging one URL barely dents the wider campaign, and why the useful thing to recognise is the pattern — a deepfake, an AI-trading-bot pitch, and a spoofed news article stacked together — rather than any single domain, which may already be gone by the time you read this.

If you see an ad like this#

Judge it by the ask, not the face in it. A deposit form appearing within a few clicks of an "AI trading bot" pitch is the tell, regardless of whose likeness introduced it. If you want to check whether a public figure really said something, search a few exact words from the video — a genuine interview is already indexed under its real context, and a spliced one usually isn't.