Scammers Up Their Game In Elon Musk Crypto Giveaway Schemes

By Prashant Jha

Elon Musk, a figure in the technology world who holds quite a great deal of charisma and influence, is often named by scammers to dupe gullible tech newbies. However, the latest scam in the tech world with Elon Musk’s name has outdone its earlier modus operandi in refinement. This time, instead of simply duping his Twitter account and luring gullible investors in, the scammers went to great lengths to create a very believable backdrop, complete with a website.

Normally, what happens is, the scammers use word of mouth and rumours to spread the wrong notion that Elon Musk is hosting a crypto giveaway and will be giving out large payouts once the concerned user meets the minimum balance criteria. Once that money is sent over to the scammers, the user waits to receive a payout, but of course that never comes.

While this is the traditional course of scamming that takes place using Elon Musk’s name, the scammers have recently proved that they have significantly upped their game.

Instead of creating a fake Twitter profile, complete with a link to an Ether Account, the scammers recently went a step further. They put together a highly believable website which went by the URL spacex.delivery, and made it seem like Elon Musk was legitimately the man behind this supposed giveaway. The website has been taken down now, probably because it was in violation of the ICANN trademark rules. The website went on to host an Ethereum log which was completely fake but was made to look like it was absolutely real. In this case, users wouldn’t even have to be particularly gullible to fall prey to such a scheme. After all, everything looked like it had the legalities in correct order. However, as it turned out, it was a scam.

Cryptocurrency scams, ICO scams etc. have become more and more common in recent days, posing higher degrees of risk to general users. Clearly, customers would be required to do their due diligence really well in order to escape the clutches of the every increasing sophistication of swindlers.