Naga Munchetty: BBC presenter speaks out on fake nude photos and online scams targeting her name

The fabricated images, which have been appearing in paid-for ads on X and Facebook, were crudely photoshopped to make it look like Munchetty was nude. But beyond the personal embarrassment, she discovered that scammers were using her name and image to trick people out of money.

Clicking on the ads led to fake news articles, styled to resemble BBC News pages, falsely claiming Munchetty had been detained after revealing a “lucrative loophole” to make money on ITV’s This Morning. The fraudulent articles then directed readers to a cyber trading scam, which has since been taken down after BBC’s legal team intervened.

Munchetty said: “I was both mortified and bemused, curious about who would pay good money to spread such obvious nonsense. And what was their motive? Is it something malicious? Someone with an axe to grind?

“I discussed it with my 5 Live production team, and we began to dig into it more. It soon became apparent that my name and image were being used by scammers to try to hoodwink people out of money.”

Munchetty is not alone. Other high-profile figures, including fellow BBC presenter Martin Lewis and wildlife broadcaster Chris Packham, have also had their names and faces misused in scams.

Packham, who first noticed fake articles about himself two years ago, described how scammers used his reputation to contact people in his professional network, asking for donations to a nonexistent conservation fund.

"What they're doing here is taking the authority, the integrity, the credibility of the BBC and, not in an immodest way, ourselves," Packham told Munchetty. "It's extraordinarily offensive and worrying. I loathe the idea that vulnerable people could potentially be exploited (by my image)."

Investigators at Which? also looked into similar scams. Lisa Barber, the consumer watchdog’s tech editor, said one of their reporters signed up to a fake website linked to an ad and was immediately bombarded with calls pressuring them to invest money. The calls came from Iceland, where several of the scam’s registered addresses were linked to a car park in Reykjavik.

People have lost hundreds of thousands of pounds to these scams, Barber said, adding that a major red flag is when callers pressure victims to invest money immediately, something a legitimate investment firm would never do.

For Munchetty, while the fake images and articles are upsetting, her primary concern is preventing people from being scammed.

"I was lucky that the BBC legal department were able to use copyright law to have the website taken down," she said. "But I've been told another website is likely to pop up soon enough, and getting ads taken down from X has become more difficult since it changed ownership."

Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, responded to the BBC’s inquiry, saying: "People who impersonate others on Facebook and Instagram violate our policies, and we remove this content when it's found - like we are doing in this case. We continue to invest in technology to improve our detection and enforcement against scams and work with law enforcement to prosecute scammers."