Last week, the Internet was surprised to meet Elon Musk on the Saturday Night Live show. Popular billionaire is known for his love of various cryptocurrencies, especially Dogecoin and Bitcoin. Of course, scammers who hunt for a huge amount of money cannot leave that ability without attention. About a year ago, his account was hacked and a fraudulent message was posted. Now, the story is close to repeating itself.
History repeats itself?
In June, 2020, a group of hackers accessed Twitter accounts of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and several other celebrities. That “hack” was rather a social engineering success, since crooks accessed the mentioned accounts using the account of a Twitter employee. Last was obtained through the spyware injection. These days, we can see a similar thing.
Fake SNL message in Twitter, in the thread with Elon Musk’s message
Official Twitter account of the SNL show was hijacked. The exact method of hijacking is unknown, at least this day, 05/12/2021. Then, fraudsters posted a reply to Elon Musk’s tweet, where he invited people to the live stream of this show. In that comment, users were invited to the cryptocurrency giveaway, under the tag “to help crypto mass adoption”. If you click the attached link – www[.]snlmusk[.]com – you will be transferred to the cryptocurrency scam page.
Different fraudsters, same methods, or Elon Musk’s 5000 BTC Giveaway
Such a title attracts a lot of attention. Along with the fact that that link was published by the official SNL account, and in the thread of Elon Musk’s post about his participation in the SNL show, users often eat this lure. Moreover, the page mimics a Medium post by its style and logo in the upper left corner. As the site states, all Bitcoins you send to the specified cryptocurrency wallet will be back to you with a tenfold multiplication. Such an attractive offer does not leave a chance for careless users to stop.
Why careless? Because there were several massive cryptocurrency scam campaigns with the same mottos. “Send us a certain amount of coins, and receive x2/x5/x10 of them!”. Sounds like a dream, but in fact – a simple swindle. Dogecoin and Safemoon scams are not single – there were about a dozen of similar frauds. If you were checking the news feed since the beginning of 2021, you likely saw the investigations of those frauds. However, such worrying statistics does not stop greedy users.
People are used to trusting celebrities, especially ones who promise them money or fame. Such an offer cannot be ignored by Musk’s subscribers, especially after all past cryptocurrency promotions he did. Thousands of users invested their money in Doge and Bitcoit, just listening to Musk’s advices. So there is nothing strange that people trusted a legitimately-looking reply to his message.
SpaceX launching satellite Doge-1 to the moon next year
– Mission paid for in Doge
– 1st crypto in space
– 1st meme in spaceTo the mooooonnn!!https://t.co/xXfjGZVeUW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 9, 2021
Technical details of that fraud
There are at least 4 sites that were shown to you after clicking the link in Twitter. One of them was marked by the majority of browsers as a hazardous page. Lucky users who got this page instead of legitimately-looking counterfeit of Medium post are likely stopped at this moment.
Fraudsters ask you to send Bitcoin to one of the following BTC wallets:
In total, these wallets received more than $100,000 in BTC equivalent. To compare, the Dogecoin scam reached $30,000 stolen in a week, and the Safemoon scam – only $12,000 for the same term. Disguise of the SNL show gives the fraudsters an extremely powerful boost. Needless to say that there are only two ways to avoid being fooled – your own attentiveness and anti-malware software with an online protection function.
How can I protect myself from such frauds?
One of the key principles of cryptocurrencies is 100% anonymity. You are not able to know the real name of a person who owns the crypto wallet and gets a transfer from you, as well as the receiver does not know who sends him the money. And, in contrast to bank transactions, you are not able to request a chargeback in case the transaction was not approved or you were scammed. You need to be extremely careful, especially when you see the offers to send a significant amount of tokens and receive them in multiplied amounts. Fraudsters will try to disguise themselves as celebrities, but you can check if they really provide the giveaway of some sort. You can check the Musk’s, Gates’ or Bezos’ pages even without logging into your Twitter/Facebook account.
User Review
( votes)
