Even during this time of crisis and despair for many in the world, the scammers are still hard at work trying to swindle crypto from innocent victims.
If you remember during the crypto boom of 2018, the scammers used to go around twitter using misspelled @elonmusk accounts trying to scam victims into sending them crypto. After the hype died down, most of them crawled back into their caves.
As the world is dealing with the novel coronavirus and COVID-19 the scammers are back at it, exploiting unsuspecting victims. This time they claim Elon Must and Tesla are hosting a crypto giveaway and all you need to do in order to enter is to send them “0.1-10BTC” to their address…
While most of us crypto OGs won’t fall for a scam like that, the average Joe will be easily fooled. Here’s an example of such an offer as a reply to one of Donald Trump’s tweets:
This is a scam. Don’t fall for it. Report this clown for trying to scam innocent victims during this time of crisis.
— NeedForBeans (@needforbeans) March 16, 2020
*backup photo in case tweet gets removed: https://gyazo.com/3d2d2ec879b3ac199025178b8185f635
How it works?
If you head over to the website bitcoingives.info you will see a medium post supposedly written by Elon Must himself:
If you click the Elon Must profile on the page it will take you to Musk’s official medium profile, just another tactic to deceive their victims.
Scrolling down you will see links to enter the giveaway. The links are for BTC, ETH, and LTC.
The way the scam works is they ask you to send them roughly $500 worth of BTC, LTC, or ETH in order to “enter” the fake giveaway.
To trick you even further, if you take a look at the transaction history for each address, you will see a payment of around $500. Here’s an example of a $1,600 payment to their ETH address: 0x7f0dD36F14f21a10f560caa3d7567f483613BaaF
Don’t be fooled! This is just the scammer sending himself money to legitimize his offer.
Before I could even write this article, this domain has been flagged by Google Chrome as a dangerous domain, and will display a warning if you try to access it. We can only hope that these scammers are caught and punished appropriately.
There should be zero tolerance for this kind of behavior during a vulnerable time like this.
