For the second time, crypto thieves have succeeded in impersonating Elon Musk on social media, in a bid to steal the cryptoassets of his more than 21 million followers, NDTV reported on August 23, 2018.
Give Me your Cryptos
According to sources close to the matter, the Tesla founder and CEO Elon Musk was a victim of Twitter hack on Thursday.
Per an NDTV report, the impersonator broke into Elon Musk’s verified Twitter account, promising his 22.5 million followers bitcoin and ether.
The fraudster claimed that the Tesla project was planning to become a private firm and as such, it would start accepting payments in digital assets like bitcoin and ether.
“We will soon be making Tesla a private company. It is an important step towards stability, and it would be impossible to move forward in a desirable pace without making such decisions,” declared the bad actor, adding “… we will be introducing Bitcoin and Ethereum as official payment methods.”
Though the business magnate is yet to comment on the matter, some of his followers who fell for the scam complained about the ugly situation.
“Report this account, already stealing from people bitcoins.” wrote one of his followers and another also tweeted: “How did it get verified,”
In spite of the recent slump in the price of bitcoin, digital currencies remain precious assets, and bad actors are continuously devising new ways to scam people.
Musk a Favorite of Hackers
It’s noteworthy that this is not the first time the SpaceX big whale is getting impersonated by cyberpunks.
Back in March 2018, SpaceX tweeted about the live webcast of the Falcon 9 rocket however one Musk impersonator responded to the @SpaceX tweet saying : “Just for today I’ve decided to give away 3000 ETH to my fans,” the scammer went on to ask Musk’s followers to send between 0.5 to 4 Ether to his ETH wallet address, to receive 40 ETH in return, and of course, many unsuspecting crypto hodlers fell for the scam.
While the Elon Musk impersonator used a verified Twitter account to carry out his unlawful act, making it almost impossible for people to quickly catch the gimmick, some other fraudsters don’t even bother using a verified Twitter account to launch their attacks.
In February two scammers used the @VitalikButter, and @VitalikButerjm handles to impersonate the real Vitalik Buterin and duped people of their hard earned cryptoassets.
The sad incident prompted Buterin to change his Twitter display name to “Vitalik Non-giver of Ether” at the time.
