Impersonation Scams Target Audiences of Rumble Creators

TLDR

• Open Measures has previously identified a host of suspicious activities occurring on Rumble, an alternative video platform supported by various prominent conservative political figures. These activities included apparent scammers’ attempts to impersonate or claim false affiliations with other Rumble creators (particularly right-wing media figures).

• Approximately 3.4% of Rumble comments posted between November 2022 and 2025 contained URLs that directed to Telegram profiles and chatrooms. More than two-thirds of these comments were posted in the nine-month period between June 2024 and February 2025.

• The individual most frequently targeted for impersonation was FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who hosted a podcast on Rumble prior to joining the Trump Administration in February 2025.

Context

Rumble, founded in 2013 as an alternative video-sharing platform, gained popularity in 2020, as conservative content creators migrated to the platform for its looser approach to content moderation (particularly in relation to misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 presidential election).¹ It has attracted significant backing from conservative investors, including tech billionaire Peter Thiel and Vice President JD Vance.²

Despite positioning itself as politically "neutral," Rumble has actively courted influencers popular with pro-Trump audiences, offering some creators lucrative contracts to broadcast on the platform.³ The company has also tacitly endorsed videos promoting right-wing conspiracy theories by placing them in the site’s "Editor's Picks" section.

Our prior research into Rumble uncovered a host of suspicious activities on the platform, including accounts engaged in apparent impersonation scams. Many of these accounts attempted to direct other users to profiles and chatrooms on Telegram — a messaging platform whose privacy features and hands-off approach to content control have made it popular among online scammers — by linking to them in comments under popular videos. 

Methodology

To build on previous research, our researchers used a simple search to identify all Rumble comments that included URLs containing a Telegram prefix (“t.me”) over a three-year period spanning November 2022 to 2025. From there, we extracted all the unique URLs from the comments we identified and counted how often each URL appeared.

Our researchers then reviewed and labeled each link that appeared in 100 or more comments with labels about the content creator and/or public figure it purported to be affiliated with. They also labelled URLs obviously associated with cryptocurrency or other financial investments; URLs not obviously trying to associate with known figures were categorized as “other.”

Analysis

Open Measures found that Telegram links appeared in more than 1.3 million Rumble comments in the three-year period reviewed, making up about 3.4% of the 37.9 million comments posted to the platform during that time. 

More than two-thirds of the comments we collected were posted over a nine-month period between June 2024 and February 2025. During that period, about 8.2% of all Rumble comments included Telegram links, though that percentage surpassed 10% on 69 days during that timeframe (with a peak of 16.7% on Dec. 7, 2024).

Since February 2025, the number of Rumble comments containing Telegram links has generally declined, though links to Telegram still appear in thousands of comments posted to the site each week.

Caption: The number of Rumble comments containing Telegram links posted to the platform per week from November 2022 to 2025.

Upon closer examination of the 1.3 million Rumble comments containing Telegram links, our researchers found about 12,800 unique URLs, 1,896 of which appeared in 100 or more comments each (meaning these links appeared in 85% of all Rumble comments with Telegram links during our analysis period).

Attempts at Targeting Rumble Creators’ Audiences

Of the 1,896 unique URLs our researchers identified, each one found in 100 or more comments, nearly 1,300 (about 68%) appeared to be impersonating or claiming false affiliations with a known Rumble content creator or prominent right-wing political figure. The others contained phrases associated with cryptocurrency schemes, like “XRP” or “QFS,” or did not obviously refer to a specific content creator. These comments were posted by tens of thousands of unique accounts, suggesting they were distributed using coordinated inauthentic activity on the platform.

The Rumble creator targeted by suspicious links most often was Dan Bongino, one of the platform’s early adopters and significant investors, who now serves as deputy director of the FBI. The highest number of unique URLs targeting content creators claimed false affiliations with Bongino, and those links appeared in significantly more Rumble comments than links associating with other creators did.

Of the URLs that appeared in 100 or more comments each, 267 were obviously impersonating Bongino, bearing names like “Contact_DanBongino” and “DanBonginoo.” Together, these 267 URLs appeared in more than 184,000 Rumble comments (representing 14% of all posts containing Telegram links during our analysis period).

Caption: Chart showing number of comments that contained links purporting to be affiliated with finance schemes, Dan Bongino, other Rumble content creators, and more. Researchers only coded links that appeared 100 or more times during the analysis period. (Graphic made with Flourish using Open Measures’ data)

Our researchers also found links purporting to be associated with at least 156 other Rumble content creators, many of whom distribute videos on the platform. In addition to Bongino, other frequent targets included:

• Donald Trump Jr. and other members of the Trump family

• Phil Godlewski, a disgraced QAnon promoter

• Derek Johnson, a pro-Trump country singer

• Pascal Najadi, a Swiss filmmaker and conspiracy theorist

• X22 Report, a conspiracy theorist podcast that has promoted QAnon

• Andrew and Tristan Tate, who produce “manosphere” podcasts

• Russell Brand, a comedian turned right-wing podcast host

• And We Know, a conspiracy theorist podcast on Rumble

• Tucker Carlson, a prominent conservative media personality

• Steve Bannon, a prominent far-right political operative and activist

Caption: List of 20 Rumble creators and political figures referenced most often in Rumble comments promoting apparent impersonation scams on Telegram and how many posts they each appeared in. (Graphic made with Flourish using Open Measures’ data)

Researchers struggled to identify a common theme among the hundreds of content creators and political figures who appeared to have been targeted for impersonations; though many of the targets were prominent figures on the platform, smaller creators were sometimes targeted as well.

Conclusion

Our researchers found that apparent impersonation scams have run rampant on Rumble in recent years, posing a significant risk to unassuming platform users who may be vulnerable to online scams. The apparent scammers on Rumble appear to have dedicated significant resources to impersonating and claiming false affiliations with other content creators on the platform, seemingly to lure other users into conversations on platforms with less oversight (most notably, Telegram).

More research may help determine the exact goals (if any) of these activities on Rumble. Open Measures will continue to monitor and report on suspicious social media activities in the interest of promoting user safety against bad actors.