More New Elon Musk Bitcoin Scams Are Plaguing Twitter with Free Crypto Giveaways

Have you ever seen Elon Musk trying to give you crypto? This very popular scam is unfortunately happening once more. Many verified accounts were hacked to impersonate the founder of Tesla and SpaceX.

Coindesk has reported that an U. S. lawmaker, a film company and a book publisher were hacked to impersonate Musk and that all these accounts are linking to a well-known crypto scam that promises to send large amounts of Bitcoin to the users if they just send a small amount first.

The hackers copied the picture of Tesla’s founder and his bio while also retweeted his tweets to look more genuine. The scam is as follows: you have to give 0.1 to 3 BTC to an address in order to receive 1 to 20 BTC later. The more you give, the more you will allegedly earn. However, obviously you will not get a single cent out of this scam, only the scammers.

A few minutes ago I saw this promoted tweet (a paid ad) from "Elon Musk" offering a free Bitcoin. All you have to do is send 'him' 0.1btc first – approximately 650 dollars. pic.twitter.com/6eNTZBYQbP

— Arieh Kovler (@ariehkovler) November 5, 2018

Elon Musk’s fake account promises to distribute 10,000 BTC (64.1 million USD) for the users but they have to deposit the money first to “prove that they are serious”.

The victims include the U. S. Democratic state representative Frank Pallone Jr and Pantheon Books. Lachlan Markay, a reporter from the Daily Beast also had his account compromised.

While the scammers first promoted their tweets, the promoted tweets were erased, but some of the accounts remain active. So far, the wallet has received more than 27 Bitcoin (around $180,000 USD) from the Pallone and Matalan accounts while the Pantheon one directed the users to a different address which received around $12,000 USD.

A lot of people have also criticized Twitter for even allowing people to do this. They outright stole the account and then promoted it all under Twitter’s nose.

There Are Other Scams

https://twitter.com/marathonartists/status/1059534974045642753

Do NOT Give these scammers any of your Crypto

The Next Web’s Hard Fork has also found another scam basically at the same time. Their reports are more focused on the hacking of Pathé, the world’s second oldest operating film company. The scam was very alike the other ones.

Pathé Films, which was hacked, was able to get the control back after some time and deleted the tweet. However, the profile of Pathe UK linked to a wallet that received $2,500 USD with the scam.The tweet received 850 RTs and 3,700 likes. So far, this wallet has received 6 from other scams.

Twitter Has Already Dealt With Fake Elon Musks Before

Unfortunately, this is far from being the first time that the site has to face scammers pretending to be Elon Musk. Countless times this has happened already, which has prompted the company to try to solve the issue.

However, as we have reported, the company was not very successful. Even freezing the accounts of the users who tried to change their names to Elon Musk did not work well, so there is little hope that Twitter will solve these issues.

It looks like we will still have to deal with “Elon Musk will give you Bitcoin” scams for a long time. The idea actually seems to be very profitable, so the attackers will simply not stop them so soon an the authorities and Twitter do not seem very keen on doing anything really effective to stop the attacks.