Crypto scams continue to emerge on social media platforms.
CEO of Tesla Motors Elon Musk comes across yet another cryptocurrency scam. This time, a video featuring Musk’s deep fake was shared on Twitter where he was allegedly promoting a fraudulent crypto project.
Deep fakes are false media in which people in an existing image or video are replaced with someone else's likeness. They are used as a form of artificial intelligence called deep learning to make images of fake events.
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The deep fake video was created by taking previous footage of Elon Musk and editing it as though he was really talking at the moment. On top of that, the video revolved around “Musk” claiming that traders should invest in a new cryptocurrency platform that offers 30% returns on crypto deposits.
Elon Musk quickly reacted and tweeted that the video was a hoax and stated that it was “definitely” not him. “Yikes. "Definitely not me," he said.
On top of that, even though the returns on investments sound unrealistic, a number of scammers are successfully using the technology pioneer as bait to steal significant amounts of money from unsuspecting investors.
However, it seems as though followers of Dogecoin were not baited into such a scam. One of the users on Twitter mentioned that “this is a terrible deep fake.”
The co-founder of Dogecoin Billy Markus commented on the deep fake and said that anyone who would believe that this is true “would lose their money to anything”. He continued and stated:
“Someone stupid enough to invest in that deserves to lose their money, but at the same time the scammers deserve to spend their life in jail.”
According to the sources, the hoax was shared by a fake exchange platform called BitVex.
On April 14, after Elon Musk announced that he would pursue purchasing Twitter for $54.20 a share, he also promised the community to get rid of the potential scammers on the platform that have stolen millions of dollars from users. He stated:
“A top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter. They make the product much worse. If I had a Dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, we’d have 100 billion Dogecoin.”
Dogecoin is an open-source P2P digital currency that currently sits at $0.073 with a 24-hour trading volume of $495,614,560, a change of -5.51% over the past 24 hours.
Earlier this year, the cybersecurity platform Group-IB reported that scammers managed to make over $1.7 million with fake crypto giveaways.