Emmerdale star admits she's victim of horrifying scam as photo used in weight-loss ads

Emmerdale’s Lisa Riley opens up about scammers using her photos to swindle fans as Coronation star Daniel Brocklebank says his likeness has also been stolen by fraudsters

An Emmerdale star has admitted that she has been a victim in an online scam – as criminals have been using her photographs to sell fake diet pills.

Lisa Riley, 48, who plays Mandy Dingle in the soap, explained that her picture has been used without her permission to sell the pills to unsuspecting people on the internet. She told ITV’s Tonight: “They say you will lose 15 kg in 3 weeks, and the amount of people that have bought slimming aids with my face linked to it is off the scale.”

In Celebrity Scams: Are You At Risk?, which airs on Thursday night on ITV, Alex Beresford speaks to both soap stars and victims to understand the rise of celebrity scams. Dan Brocklebank from Coronation Street said people have been creating fake accounts impersonating him to lure fans into giving up their money.

Lisa plays Mandy Dingle in Emmerdale
Brocklebank said: “It’s happened so many times, people set up what they call my personal account or my official account and start to message people, and they’re being conned out of thousands of pounds”.

Lisa said these fake accounts are “happening more and more” and claimed the scammers were “hunting vulnerable women”. She said: “They start talking under a fake account commenting on the storyline telling someone you’re beautiful, you’re gorgeous. And I’ll step in and say he’s not real!”

And scammers are not only using celebrity identities to dupe people into buying fake weight loss products as one victim’s daughter in the show reveals she was duped into believing she was in a relationship with not one but two soap stars. A daughter of one of the scam victims, referred to as Kirsty in the documentary, opened up about how traumatic the ordeal was for her and her family. In 2023, her mother was contacted by someone she thought was Emmerdale actor Tony Audenshaw.

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Lisa has described the scams using her images as “upsetting”
After noticing a change in her mother’s behaviour, Kirsty said she drove to her house and found suitcases in her hallway. Her mother told her she had fallen in love with someone from Emmerdale. “I immediately got suspicious, she said he’s my soul mate, I know him really well,” Kirsty explained.

Almost £20,000 in gift cards had been drained from her mum’s savings and while she was able to get some of the money back, the same thing happened a year later. “I noticed that she’d spent about £2000 in a three day period. I phoned her and the first thing she said was: ‘it’s not a scam, he sent me videos of himself this time’,” she said.

This time, the scammer was pretending to be Jeff Hordley, another Emmerdale star and had used artificial intelligence technology to tailor his words towards Kirsty’s mum. Kirsty said: “Mum felt really humiliated, she’s grieving really, it’s the loss of not just money, it’s, it’s the loss of what she thought was a relationship as well.” The documentary will be airing on Thursday night at 8.30pm on ITV1 and ITVX.