Scammers Impersonate Elon Musk on Twitter and Make $180,000

A new and notable scam campaign has been discovered online. The perpetrators used Elon Musk’s identity and hacked Twitter accounts, earning a daily revenue of 28 bitcoins (about $180,000).

The scammers started their scheme by hacking any verified Twitter account and then changing its name to “Elon Musk.” Next, they posted messages claiming to be from Musk, announcing the “biggest bitcoin giveaway in history”—10,000 digital coins.

“I’m giving away 10,000 bitcoins (BTC) to the community,” read the hacked account.

What’s worse, these posts were even promoted using Twitter’s advertising system. This allowed the scam to reach a large audience of unsuspecting users and made the tweets appear more legitimate.

The scammers also shared links to websites like musk[.]plus, musk[.]fund, and spacex[.]plus, where users were instructed to send between 0.1 and 3 bitcoins in order to supposedly receive much more in return.

Surprisingly, in just one day, the scammers received 392 transactions, earning them 28 bitcoins or $180,000.

To further promote their campaign, the scammers also hacked the Twitter accounts of the Ministry of Transport of Colombia and the National Disaster Response Force of India. Using these accounts, they tried to convince users that the digital currency was indeed being returned.