Investor sends 10 BTC to scammers posing as Elon Musk

An anonymous user sent 10 BTC to scammers who, from a fake Elon Musk Twitter account, promised to double the amount. BBC reports.

A source from the publication followed the scammers’ link in the comments on the post by the real head of Tesla. On the fraudulent site, he was offered to double the amount from 0.1 BTC to 20 BTC.

Having confirmed that the link originated from a verified account, the investor began weighing the transaction amount: 5 BTC or 10 BTC.

“Take the maximum, I thought; it’s obviously true. So I sent 10 BTC,” the anonymous person said.

The site promised the funds would arrive within 20 minutes — a special countdown timer was running.

The user refreshed his wallet twice per minute, waiting for the doubled amount, but never received the bitcoins.

“I realised that this was all a big scam. … I thought I had just squandered a critically important sum for my family, money for early retirement and for all my children’s future holidays. I went upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed to tell my wife. I woke her up and said I had made a terrible, really a huge, mistake,” he added.

The victim spent hours emailing the site’s address and the fake Elon Musk on Twitter hoping to recover at least part of what was lost.

According to analytics service Whale Alert, 2021 was a record year for losses from fake crypto giveaways. In under three months, scammers stole $18 million, versus $16 million for all of 2020.

As reported, Charles Hoskinson, CEO of IOHK, the company behind Cardano, threatened a class-action lawsuit against YouTube and Twitter over cryptocurrency scams on the platforms.

Earlier, Ripple filed a similar suit against YouTube. The cause was fraudulent XRP token giveaways in which the company’s CEO Brad Garlinghouse frequently featured.

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