Elon Musk is not giving away any crypto, so you know. It’s not a thing that happens, no matter what you’ve heard. Which is what scams like this rely on: word of mouth. Hey, did you hear you can get free Bitcoin and Ether from Elon Musk? I saw it on his Twitter page. The victim then acquires the minimum amount required by the scammer and sends it away, never to receive the payout.
Today’s scammers went a step beyond the standard fake Twitter profile and link to an Ether address. They created a whole website, spacex.delivery (no longer available – likely the ICANN’s trademark rules were enforced. For the victimized party, it’s as simple as contacting the registrar, and the domain is frozen unless or until the domain owner can prove they have some legal reason to be able to use the trademarked namespace.)
The site had a fake Ethereum transaction log on it, as seen above. The actual transaction history of the address mentioned looked like this at time of writing:
As you can see, this diverges from what’s shown on the webpage. There are no outgoing transactions.
There’s a strong liklihood there was no actual incoming Eth, as we discussed here. Although, there are three transactions that meet the “minimum requirements.” This one, this one, and this one.
The rest of the scam was pretty standard: a short blog post on Medium complete with fake comments. One person claims to have received 30 Eth, and another 20. But there were no deposits of that size, so judging by the “verification” method required in the scam’s mechanics, it’s just funny. In crypto we have proof of most everything. The least they could have done is dug up a transaction of that size and linked to it, for the benefit of the unwitting user.
The old rule applies: if it’s too good to be true, it probably is. Elon Musk may be charitable, but that doesn’t mean he has time to go around giving non-tax-deductible donations. Neither do you. So avoid anything that says “Elon Musk” and “free [insert cryptocurrency].” If ever he does give blockchain money away for free, you’ll definitely hear about it from a reputable source like CCN. In the meantime, please be smart with your crypto. And if you bought for the express purpose of letting Elon Musk double it for you, well, you bought at a good time and now’s the time to hold it.
Featured image from Youtube/PowerfulJRE.
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