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Customers misplaced over $2 million in cryptocurrency to scammers impersonating Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk over the past six months, the Federal Trade Commission reported Monday.
“Guarantees of assured large returns or claims that your cryptocurrency might be multiplied are at all times scams,” the fee mentioned in its Monday report.
For years, scammers have posed as Musk so as to fraud social media customers out of cryptocurrency. They use deceptive tactics on sites like Twitter, typically utilizing the identical avatar photos as Musk’s personal account and barely misspelling his username. Pretending to be Musk, the scammers will ask victims to ship forex to a particular pockets tackle in change for receiving a bigger cost in return. The scams violate Twitter’s policy against deceptive accounts, however moderators have struggled to rein within the exercise, and it stays prevalent on the platform.
The $2 million determine was revealed in a bigger report on cryptocurrency revealed by the FTC on Monday. Since final October, customers reported shedding greater than $80 million in cryptocurrency scams, rising “greater than ten-fold year-over-year,” the fee mentioned. Customers lose round $1,900 by these scams on common.
Musk himself was a goal in one of many largest Twitter bitcoin scams final summer time. In one of many largest breaches in Twitter historical past, attackers compromised accounts belonging to Musk, President Barack Obama, President Joe Biden, Invoice Gates, and even Apple to advertise a bitcoin rip-off. The attackers acquired practically $120,000 from the rip-off that forced Twitter to block all verified customers from posting new tweets for a number of hours.
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