Today’s five-hour YouTube Live broadcast used Elon Musk’s in-depth hoax to promote a cryptocurrency scam, the latest in a series of similar fake streams. In the since-deleted video, a clip of Musk, designed to look like a live broadcast from a Tesla event, featured an AI-generated version of his voice instructing viewers to visit a website and deposit their bitcoins in Ethereum. or Dogecoin to participate in a giveaway. The looping message promised that the system would then “automatically send back double the amount of cryptocurrency you deposited.”
At one point, more than 30,000 viewers tuned in to the stream (although we can’t rule out the possibility that those numbers were inflated by bots), pushing it to the top of YouTube’s Live Now recommendations. The @elon.teslastream account masquerading as Tesla had the Official Artist Channel verification badge, so we can look at the account being hacked. After Engadget contacted Google, both the video and the channel were removed. We will update this article if we hear any additional information.
These deeply fraudulent Elon Musk scams, in each case using an account posing as one of Musk’s companies, have proliferated over the past few months. This is “Tesla’s [sic] presents his masterpiece: the Tesla that will change the automotive industry forever. At the beginning of June, I. Cointelegraph At the time of Starship’s launch, it reported similar scams run by 35 accounts posing as SpaceX. In April, scammers tried to get in on the eclipse hype using the same tactic Mashable said the time. And there is a lot of news fake Musk live streams placed on it Reddit recently.
Crypto scams targeting Musk’s social media followers have been a problem for years, as have those involving celebrities in general. Just this Friday, 50 Cent was hacked that he used his accounts to run a pump and dump scheme.
