Fake News Alert! – 15 Nov 18
The Elon Musk bitcoin scam.
Fake Elon Musk twitter accounts scamming followers Bitcoins – Web
Why?
High profile Twitter accounts, like Pantheon Books, got hacked to promote bitcoin scam using Elon Musk’s name. Known as the Elon Musk bitcoin scam.
How did we do our research?
We went to Twitter and checked if it is true. Glad to say, these tweets are rare now. We searched tweet history to check and read many articles regarding the topic.
Findings:
Fake accounts impersonating famous people’s accounts aren’t anything new. However, there are still people falling for these scams and it is our duty to warn you about it. The scam is fairly simple. Verified Twitter accounts get hacked, then the profile name and picture gets switched to mimic Elon Musk. Then they would reply to actual Elon Musk tweets, so it would appear as Elon Musk is replying to himself. In the scam tweets, they would ask for Bitcoins and promise high returns. Let’s be honest, this isn’t that far from his actual crazy tweets. So, people thinking it is Elon Musk and sends them their Bitcoins.
The pressure is now on Twitter, putting its security into question. Branded accounts almost never use two factor authentications, because branded accounts is shared amongst many social media handlers. As well as, these scammers promotes its Tweets on Twitter so more people would see them. Twitter acquired Smyte to try to reduce the visibility of these scam tweets and improve security.
The exact amount the scammers got is unknown, checking bitcoin transaction history isn’t as simple as opening your bank statement. However, one of the scam links we discovered had 82 clicks.
