Billionaire tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has become the target of a crypto scam that tries to impersonate him in order to fool his followers on Twitter. Yes, again.
The obvious intention of the scammers is to mislead followers and get them to send their Bitcoin(BTC)trade and Ethereum (ETH)trade funds to the fraudsters’ cryptocurrency wallets. Apparently, Musk’s fake Twitter accounts are attempting to lure in unsuspecting individuals with a “surprise gift” for crypto enthusiasts.
One of the tweets reads, “If you send in 1 BTC or 10 ETH, you will get the Grand Prize: a brand new Tesla Model S Performance with Midnight Silver Metallic, Solid Black and Red Multi-Coat exterior, delivery included.” The tweet then directs the followers to two links where the payments can be made. The two links, one for Bitcoin and another for Ethereum, request the followers to send their cryptocurrencies in order to bag the grand prize.
However, the scammers made a mistake when they said on behalf of Elon Musk that at Tesla it is believed that “cryptocurrency is the best asset that can be distributed globally in a transparent and trustless way.” Despite the obvious duplicity in these tweets (a diligent follower of Elon Musk would probably know better), many other innocent Twitter followers of the tech tycoon continue to fall prey to similar frauds.
Although the tweet is no longer available, what is surprising about these sorts of tweets is that they are designed in sophisticated ways which are giving hard time to crawlers (tweet detectors) on Twitter that are trying to catch and remove such false affirmations impersonating Elon Musk or other known figures.
Twitter Tries Fighting Crypto Scams
Twitter has recently been busy trying to discover and delete Bitcoin scams that were impersonating Elon Musk’s account to promote such digital currency cons. Interestingly, Twitter has accidentally banned Musk’s own account when he made a joke about selling Bitcoin.
This is not the first time that Elon Musk has been attacked with such scams. In 2018, an entire army of Ethereum scams and spambots led his followers to believe in multitude of scams, all of which asked the followers to spend their digital currencies on fraudulent schemes.
It is worthy to note that Elon Musk is not the only popular figure on Twitter whose impersonation continues to cause loss to the followers who end up believing in these scams. Just recently, Jeremy Clarkson’s name got involved in a crypto scam on Twitter as well known as the ‘Bitcoin Revolution,’ which became quite infamous ever since. The scam made up bogus articles, attributes them to famous figures and spreads them on the social media. As always, for every effectual scam, a lot of victims are caught in the net.
