Fraudulent Elon Musk deepfake spreads on Twitter

A deepfake of Elon Musk on Twitter urges investments in an obvious scam.

This week on Twitter, a deepfake of Elon Musk spread widely, in which he “urges people to invest” in an obvious scam.

In the fake video, the head of Tesla and SpaceX “talks about” a new project that allegedly yields users “30% dividends every day for life”.

The fraud was organized by the fake trading platform BitVex. Musk’s “voice” was made so mechanical that it’s hard to fully understand his speech.

The billionaire himself also confirmed that the video was a fake.

“Ugh. Of course this isn’t me,” he wrote.

Dogecoin co-founder Billy Markus also commented on the poor quality of the viral video.

“Anyone foolish enough to invest in this deserves to lose their money. At the same time, the scammers deserve to spend their life in prison,” he added.

In mid-February, YouTube lost $1.6 million in cryptocurrencies over three days on fake streams. The attackers then edited videos from old appearances of famous figures in the crypto world and entrepreneurs. The most-used images were those of Vitalik Buterin, Elon Musk, Changpeng Zhao and others.

In early April, Musk becomes Twitter’s largest shareholder after acquiring 9.2% of the shares for $2.89 billion.

On April 14, he proposed to buy the social network for more than $43 billion, but later suspended the deal after media reported inflated Twitter audience metrics.

Nevertheless, the businessman remains committed to the purchase. One of his goals is to defeat spam bots.

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