Don't Send Any Money To 'Matt Rife'
Matt Rife’s Christmas-themed Netflix special may not technically be the worst thing attached to the the controversial TikTok star’s name in 2025. But that’s only because “Matt Rife” has reportedly been begging fans North of the border for large sums of money.
While Rife alienated a lot of comedy fans with his glib jokes about domestic abuse, his mock apologies and his “third grader in 1995”-tier love of hacky slurs, clearly a lot of people still like him enough to be duped into trusting imposters.
According to CTV News, a resident of Guelph, Ontario filed a complaint with their local police department after they were “contacted online by someone pretending to be Matt Rife.” The faux Rife sent the victim a message saying that they “were having issues with their banking,” promising to pay off the mark’s credit card debt in exchange for help depositing a check for $5000.
This article not your thing? Try these...
“Rife” sent over their banking info, and the fan complied with the request. Then “Rife” asked them to “withdraw the money and deposit it into Bitcoin,” which they did, only to be “notified by their bank that they had deposited a fraudulent cheque, and their bank account had been compromised.”
Scammers claiming to be celebrities is obviously nothing new, lest we forget the time that some guy bought a bunch of gold using a Ricky Gervais passport made out of artwork from The Office DVDs. And as The Hollywood Reporter noted, crypto romance grifters pretending to be stars like George Clooney, Keanu Reeves and Kevin Costner is a “billion-dollar” scam, frequently targeting the elderly.
Despite not being quite at the Clooney level of stardom, Rife’s name is apparently a popular tool among multiple scammers, at least according to various Reddit posts. This problem became so rampant that the real Rife – we’re pretty sure it was the real Rife – had to warn fans never to send money to someone claiming to be him or one of his representatives.
One silver lining for the comedian: now, when you Google the words “Matt Rife” and “theft,” the results aren’t just articles about his act.