Finfluencers and the New Risk Culture

In an age where social media sets the pace for both dreams and decisions, a new kind of economic movement is taking shape. It appears in short videos from tropical beaches, glittering watches, and in promises of financial freedom, all delivered by young people who claim to have cracked the code. They are called finfluencers, and for many young people they have become the latest economic guides.

Investigate Europe (IE) shows that several of these finfluencers promote unauthorized trading platforms and unlicensed investment opportunities, often without disclosing the commissions they earn from them. They have documented fraud networks that together have reached tens of thousands of Europeans, some with more than 70,000 registered victims.

Behind this lies a deeper trend: a culture in which economic systems are no longer understood but imitated. Entrepreneurship is reduced to an aesthetic, a backdrop of wealth, and investing becomes an identity marker. To succeed, one must first look like someone who already has.

The Economy of Imitation

Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman once described how consumer society transformed us from citizens into “tourists in our own reality,” people who move through life and systems without deep grounding, guided by impulse and performance rather than reflection. Today, we are becoming tourists in economic systems as well. We are tempted to make the same risky moves influencers demonstrate, without understanding the risks ourselves. And we are drawn to the profits they display, without examining what those profits are actually built on.

In one of IE’s investigations, young investors said they were lured in by screenshots of other people’s gains, while they themselves ended up with losses of several hundred euros. The finfluencer offers a shortcut: financial freedom without insight, strategic thinking without substance. Not because people are naïve, but because algorithms reward the feeling of mastery more than mastery itself. When everything moves fast, the shortcut seems more appealing than the work real understanding requires.

The result is a kind of digital economic literature in which the story is not “how the market works,” but “how you can resemble someone who has succeeded.”

Disconnected From Risk

We live in a time when technology has made investing easier than ever. On one level, this is a good thing: more people gain access to tools once reserved for experts. But these tools have arrived without the shared knowledge, language, and experience needed to understand the risks involved.

Technological simplification has not made the economy simple; it has only made it possible to hide complexity behind aesthetics. Risk is no longer visible but presented like a filter, something that can be turned on and off based on preference.

When young people lose money on a trading app, it is not necessarily because they lack judgment. It is because the systems around them are designed to trigger impulse, not reflection. In Portugal alone, police estimate that young investors lost around 50 million euros to such schemes between 2022 and 2024. And according to the European Commission, Europeans collectively lost an estimated 4 billion euros to digital investment fraud last year, a number that is likely an understatement.

Entrepreneurship Without Depth

In classical economic theory, entrepreneurship is the ability to understand value creation, risk, and long-term thinking. In the digital shift, the concept has morphed into something else: the ability to promote, position, and display.

When entrepreneurship becomes an aesthetic project, risk becomes aesthetic too, something that can be filtered, toned down, or wrapped in luxury. This makes young people more vulnerable to unauthorized investment offers, but also less able to develop the kind of judgment that long-term value creation requires.

We now face the strange situation in which young people often have greater access to investment opportunities than to economic education.

What Is at Stake

It is easy to dismiss finfluencers as a fringe phenomenon. But they reveal a deeper cultural shift: we are trading economic understanding for economic performance. In this landscape, young people risk becoming subject to the dramaturgy of algorithms rather than the realities of the market.

The challenge of technology is not that it opens doors for many, but that it makes the doors so wide that we overlook what lies behind them. If we are to preserve the hope of an economy that creates real value, we need to uphold the most fundamental form of entrepreneurship: the ability to understand before we act. Not to stifle young people’s ambitions, but to give a stronger compass.