How Outtake Shut Down Hundreds of Imposter Scams in Record Time

Pershing Square Capital Management is a Wall Street powerhouse managing over $18 billion in assets under famed investor Bill Ackman’s leadership. As an activist fund, Ackman and team take large stakes in public companies and push for strategic improvements that significantly impact stock prices. Ackman’s high-profile campaigns have shaped the fortunes of companies like Chipotle, Canadian Pacific Railway, and Netflix. This massive influence makes Pershing Square a prime target for fraudsters looking to manipulate markets.

In March 2024, Pershing Square began facing a relentless wave of impersonation scams. Hundreds of fake ads featuring Ackman’s name and image flooded social platforms, luring unsuspecting retail investors into private chat groups with promises of 125% annual returns and stock tips from “associates” of the billionaire. 

For Pershing Square, this wasn’t just a reputational issue. At a limit was a threat to broader market stability. Each fake ad misguided the public by creating false illusions of public market endorsements. By partnering with Outtake, Pershing Square mobilized against the exponential growth of social engineering attacks.

Outtake was built to solve the industrial-scale impersonation of high-profile organizations, brands and key executives. With AI, bad actors are automating the creation and distribution of hundreds of impersonation scams across public communication channels. The result is social media, app stores, ad libraries and websites being flooded with imposter scams that trick victims into forfeiting their sensitive credentials or money. 

Despite repeatedly flagging the fraudulent content to various platforms, it often took weeks for them to be removed—by which point the damage was done and dozens of new ones had already appeared. “These social attacks are like viruses, constantly attacking, replicating, and attempting to spread,” said Fran McGill, Pershing Square Partner. “It turns the solution was building an immune system that was always on guard, keeping the attack levels low - that’s what Outtake built”

Our view is that traditional human-led remediation is no longer enough to identify and protect against AI-powered scams. These attacks are being distributed at machine speeds, with hundreds emerging in the span of hours. The only way to keep up will be with automated detection and proactive disruption.

Pershing Square turned to Outtake’s automated identity protection engine—a system that leverages agentic AI to detect and remove impersonations before they impact real victims.

In only a month, Outtake’s platform proved to be a game-changer:

• Detected and removed 100s of unique impersonations across seven online platforms
  
  
• Achieved a median takedown time of just 2.6 hours — nearly 300x faster than when Pershing Square relied on a manual-based solution that took weeks.
  
  
• Protected an estimated $68,000 in potential fraud losses for consumers that would have encountered these scams, based on the FTC’s median scam loss of $800 per victim to imposter scams in 2023.

To strengthen their executive protection efforts, Pershing Square deployed Outtake’s OSINT module—an AI-powered surveillance tool that continuously scans the web for mentions of Bill Ackman, Pershing Square, and their leadership team. This enables them to track the spread of misleading content, reputation-damaging narratives, and potential threats across communication channels.

"Outtake has singlehandedly changed how we protect our brand and executives online. I'm our biggest user, and I can't believe how much time the platform saves me. With it, we continue to crush our security and reputational benchmarks."

— Francis McGill, Partner, Pershing Square