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Pretending to be Elon Musk is the perfect front for crypto-scammers
On Thursday night, a YouTube live stream of SpaceX's satellite launch garnered significant attention online. As audience members waited for the countdown to commence, they could supposedly interact with SpaceX, more specifically its founder Elon Musk, through a different platform: a crypto-giveaway.
The video promoted an “Elon Musk 5000 BTC Giveaway” and all you had to do to be eligible was send anywhere from 0.1 BTC to 20 BTC first.
YouTube took the video down roughly two hours later, but it was too late. Over 36,000 viewers had already tuned in and over $200,000 worth of crypto was lost.
This video is just one example of a growing contingent of Elon Musk-themed crypto scams weaving their way through the interwebs. Starting in 2018, these scams began on fake Twitter accounts then migrated to hijacked YouTube accounts and now have begun trickling into Facebook-sponsored posts.
A quick Google search turns back numerous results from mainstream news outlets like Wired and USA Today reporting on these scams. Even Musk himself warned fans not to fall for these ploys adding that, “This is not cool.”
Musk, who could not be reached for comment, has become a bit of a staple in online crypto-culture. He is known to often tweet about the topic and even took a stab at explaining the technology to author J.K. Rowling. Yet he also claims to have never personally invested in crypto beyond receiving .25 BTC from a friend.
Despite the many public debunkings of these scams and Musk’s lack of personal crypto holdings, these plots have been successful time and again, often to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.
This made me wonder two things: Why are these scams so repeatedly successful? And, more importantly, why Elon Musk?
According to a security specialist at MyCrypto Harry Denley, these scams rely on trust. The more easily victims trust a scammer, the more people who will participate in the scam.
Therefore, these “trust-trading” ploys are the most effective, Denley explained, cyber-criminals impersonate people well-known for their wealth and tech prowess, such as founders of a major technology company.
Based on data from BitcoinWhosWho, fake Elon Musk scams are far and away the most popular tech CEO for scammers to impersonate. Since the beginning of the year, BitcoinWhosWho has received reports of 171 Elon Musk scams compared to 40 Bill Gates scams and six Bezos ones.
Evidently, there is something special about Musk that has scammers going to the well again and again. To figure out Musk’s scam je ne sais quoi, I reached out to a friend from college who almost fell for one on Twitter. My friend Aki, who has asked to not be identified by his last name, does not fit the typical profile of a scam victim. He is a former Microsoft software engineer who spends a lot of time online.
Aki said that one day he saw someone reply to a legitimate Elon Musk tweet with the same profile photo as Musk and a near-identical Twitter handle promising to send people huge amounts of BTC. He added that the reply itself had a large number of likes and responses with people thanking Musk for sending them crypto.
“If this was Bill Gates, I would’ve just scrolled past it,” Aki said.
But, because it was Elon Musk, Aki didn’t and he even tried to recruit some of his friends to go in on it with him, who then promptly talked him out of the endeavor.
Though Aki does not identify as “an Elon Musk fanboy,” he thinks he fell for the scam partially because he greatly admires and respects Musk’s accomplishments and also because this is something he thinks Musk would legitimately do.
“He’s out here tweeting that the Tesla stock price is too high,” Aki said. “If he is down to do things like that, who is to say he wouldn’t just give out 100 bitcoin to publicize some new Tesla launch?”
Evidently, scammers are tricking even seasoned netizens by playing into Musk’s history of brashness and unpredictability. And these scams show no sign of slowing down with dozens of instances popping up across Youtube and Facebook this past week alone.
“This will continue to be whack-a-mole” Facebook’s Director of Product Management Rob Leatheren said on Twitter adding that a solution will require platforms working in concert to target these scams.
To protect yourself and others from these scams, I’ll be releasing a Part II on investigating and verifying Elon Musk crypto-scams next week. In the meantime, be sure to utilize resources like BitcoinsWhosWho and even a simple Google search to steer clear of these ploys.
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