Fake Elon Musk Bitcoin giveaway has been unmasked - scammers intended to illicitly gain cryptocurrencies by mimicking Tesla's creator account in Twitter. What else do we know?
3 September, AtoZ Markets – Just some hours after cryptocurrency giveaway scam bots have targeted the official account of Pope Francis to advertise a fake Bitcoin giveaway, Elon Musk’s account has been attacked.
Fake Elon Musk Bitcoin Giveaway Busted
Mr. Musk has later on responded to a thread citing Twitter’s latest series of scam bots’ messages, stating:
“At this point, I want ETH even if it is a scam”
Notably, just right under this comment, a fake “Elon Musk” has appeared to promote a purported cryptocurrency giveaway from him. As of the moment, the tweet is deleted.
This seems to be a usual practice when the network of scam accounts retweets and likes to push the fake reply to the top of the thread to make it look like Elon Musk has replied to his own tweet. This practice is usually implemented with a number of high profile Twitter accounts in order to mislead users.
Just like that, scam bots are luring their victims in a bid to gain some profits illegally. This particular scam is featuring the link that shows Musk at a speaking event, while supposedly linking it to the announcement by Musk that is hosted on medium.com.
When the user clicks on this link, he or she is taken to the fraudulent website “https://musk-surprise.info.” Here, users can find a Medium article allegedly by Elon Musk. The article supposedly outlines the basics of the giveaway, stating that he offers both Bitcoin and Ethereum in addition to a Tesla Model 3 to one winner.
In order to win the giveaways, a user would need to “verify” his or her wallet addresses. The fraudsters suggest doing so by sending a crypto sum first.
A real Elon Musk?
In fact, at first glance, the photo and name seem to be ok, considering the poster’s URL, which is www.medium.com/@elonmusk. This is the correct spelling of the Space X founder’s name. If you click on the poster’s name, it, however, takes you to the page of a different user that is going under the name “Rahul” with the URL www.medium.com/@elonmusk.
Additionally, the Medium article that is promoting the supposed Bitcoin and Ethereum giveaway by Elon Musk has a big number of suspiciously positive comments at the bottom of the page. This is usually one of the primary signs that the same kind of bots is posting these replies.
Twitter scammers have been targeting high profile accounts earlier this year in order to compromise these profiles, thus tricking users into thinking they promote giveaways.
Since that time, cybercriminals appear to amend their strategies. Now, they focus on creating a number of duplicate accounts for these accounts and bypassing Twitter algorithms in order to advertise scam content.
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