Success often brings more than financial opportunity - it brings visibility. As athletes, entertainers, and other high-profile individuals build wealth and influence, they can become targets for increasingly sophisticated cyber fraud and security threats. Recent events have highlighted how quickly these risks can emerge.

In 2025, criminals were committing burglaries at the homes of several Hollywood actors and professional athletes. The criminals were using increasingly sophisticated methods of targeting victims, including Wi-Fi jammers to knock out surveillance cameras, and monitoring celebrities’ movements on social media.

In the Spring of 2026, hackers allegedly breached a major soccer team and their governing body, leaking passports, contracts, and emails online.

Professional athletes and entertainers are used to the spotlight, but it can also bring unwanted attention. Technology, and the evolution of AI, has made it easier for bad actors to identify and exploit their friends, family, coaches, agents, and others around them — many of whom do not see themselves as typical scam targets. This affects everyone across sports and entertainment with talent of all ages and career stages.

Your next entertainment project, or major-league contract, can turn an entertainer and/or an athlete into a target overnight, but the habits needed to manage that exposure take much longer to develop. Instead of launching a direct attack at you, scammers are increasingly targeting those inner circles as a less guarded route to the same payday. The best way for you to keep your wealth safe is to understand the latest threats and tactics before they can target you, or someone you trust.

A generational issue

People tend to think of fraud as an unchanging monolith, a single, unified threat that typically targets older adults. The reality, according to the FBI’s 2025 Internet Crime Report, is much more troubling. The FBI logged more than a million complaints last year, for a combined total of US$20.9 billion in reported losses, with victims across every age group. With the largest transfer of generational wealth in history now underway, scammers have all the incentive they need to widen the net to include the people closest to the money.

That does not mean every family member or friend will get targeted by the same technique. Scammers have tailored their attacks to exploit every generation’s blind spots. With older relatives, the opening is often loneliness or isolation. Working-age family members are more likely to be reeled in by promises of fake business opportunities or promotions. Younger people, meanwhile, are at greater risk of extortion, shaming, and AI‑generated image scams that surface through gaming sites and social media.

In some cases, all a scammer needs is a last name, hometown and social media presence to map an entire network of potential entry points. Your social media presence is your social currency which can be manipulated by threat actors to sully your reputation and make a fast buck. Fraudsters may impersonate a family member involved in key financial decisions to gain access to account information.

They may also monitor long-time friends and family to learn schedules and strike at high-pressure moments, for example during long travel stretches while filming or deep in a playoff run, when targets are more likely to be distracted. In other cases, friends are manipulated into compromising situations in the hope that the entertainer or athlete will step in to help.

When you come from generational wealth, you have time to prepare. When you come into it on your own, the target on your back only gets bigger.

New money, new problems

Families with long-standing wealth are much more aware of the risks that come with it. They have worked with private bankers, wealth managers and security advisors long enough to recognize the warning signs. But entertainers and athletes experiencing a sudden increase in their wealth rarely have that benefit.

A younger entertainer, or pro athlete, can be wealthier than their parents with the stroke of a pen, often with little preparation for what comes next. That kind of exposure opens them up to a torrent of unsolicited requests before they know who they can trust. The risk does not stop with them. Their inner circle is just as exposed, especially when trust gets extended too quickly.

Build guardrails before something happens

If you want to keep your friends and family safe from bad actors, you need to be proactive. That means having regular conversations about common scams, explaining how they work and how to avoid them. For instance, scammers may spend weeks or months building up relationships on gaming platforms and social media apps to target credit card information stored on those services.

Keep an open dialogue with everyone involved with your finances, including your managers, agents, family members, and financial advisors, to make sure they do not make any changes without speaking directly with you – even using a codeword to guard against a scam using AI to mimic your voice.

It also means stressing the importance of honesty and accountability if someone makes a mistake. Shame tends to keep people quiet; the sooner you find out what happened and communicate that to everyone who needs to know – affected friends and family, financial institutions and law enforcement – the more options you will have at your disposal.

The next step is to make fraudulent requests harder to act on. You can do that by setting up reasonable credit card limits, turning on account alerts and requiring a second check before large payments are sent to anyone. Be careful about handing over a credit card just because a request seems harmless or convenient in the moment. As older members of your circle become more vulnerable, those financial safeguards may need to become more formal.

Most scams work by creating a false sense of urgency that prompts people to ignore their better judgment. In a culture that feels the need to respond immediately, the simplest defence is to slow down. Bad actors are counting on victims to react fast, stay quiet and trust the wrong people.

Before acting on any unexpected or high‑pressure request, verify it through a second channel and involve someone you trust. While many of us think we can spot scams and AI fakes, victims of scams driven by overconfidence likely felt the same way. Any good coach will tell you that discipline matters most before the pressure rises. Protecting wealth is no different. The best‑protected individuals slow the game down, build clear rules, and practice good habits long before they are tested. In an environment designed to rush decisions and exploit trust, the real advantage comes from preparation, communication and knowing when to lean on your management team or a teammate for support.

Institutional Support: BMO’s Approach

Financial institutions are increasingly investing in advanced cybersecurity infrastructure to protect clients.

Our Financial Crimes Unit (FCU) is a security operations team that’s the first of its kind in Canada.

Founded in 2019, the FCU combines expertise from our cyber security, fraud, physical security, and crisis management teams to detect, prevent, respond to and recover from security threats. Learn more at BMO.com/Security.