Elon Musk has been a prominent figure throughout the bitcoin- and cryptocurrency community because he represents new, innovative & futuristic technology. People even speculated at one point that Elon Musk secretly was the inventor of bitcoin.
Recently a nasty scam has unfortunately spread like wildfire on almost every prominent crypto-related figure’s twitter. Scammers impersonate the well-known figure by changing their display name and profile picture to the exact same as the one being impersonated. Usually, the scammer promises something along the lines of “I am donating this much of this coin to the community, send x amount to this address, and I’ll send 10 times the amount back to the sender’s address”. These are all scams, NEVER send anything to anyone promising you something in return, even if it looks to be Elon Musk.
Elon Musk isn’t at least publicly known to be involved in the bitcoin/cryptocurrency industry. But has, either way, recently become one of the people scammers love to impersonate.
This is a prime example of the scam being performed, notice the @ of the twitter profile is Alon_musk not elonmusk and that the profile doesn’t have a verified badge. These bots also post replies to their own messages, claiming they actually received the reward. Just remember that you should NEVER send anything to these kinds of posts, or anyone else promising you something in return.
Two days ago when tweeting about the upcoming launch of his Falcon rocket, Elon was asked about the ETH spam on his profile. He responded saying that he was aware of it and had let Jack Dorsey, the co-founder & CEO of Twitter, know of this problem. Elon also mentioned that he didn’t own any cryptocurrency besides 0.25 bitcoin he received a couple of years ago.
Hopefully, Twitter can do something about this rapidly growing problem as it not only is unfortunate for the victims of this scam but could also hurt the reputation of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as some people already are very skeptical of this new technology. One “positive” thing concerning these scams is that they most likely aren’t stealing as much money as one might think when checking the scammer’s address on any explorer. It is very possible that scammers move funds between his own addresses and the one he is using to scam with, making the whole thing more believable. Nevertheless, some people are losing their funds because of this, otherwise, these twitter bots would simply disappear over time.