Overview

• Established in January, the LBF NRW’s Influencer-Team brings together 1,200 experts to coordinate regional financial crime investigations.
• Officials have confirmed roughly €300 million in suspected unpaid taxes by professional influencers in North Rhine-Westphalia.
• Investigators are processing a dataset of 6,000 social media records to map undeclared income streams across multiple platforms.
• Approximately 200 criminal proceedings are underway, with average tax shortfalls in the high five figures and some individual cases exceeding several million euros.
• Authorities cite influencers’ use of fleeting “story” advertisements and relocations to destinations like Dubai as key obstacles in proving evasion.