New Fake Elon Musk Crypto Giveaway Scam Costs Man $550K

A new fake Elon Musk crypto giveaway scam has just cost a German man $550,000 as he said to BBC that he sent 10 BTC to a scammer believing that he will double his money so let’s read more in our latest cryptocurrency news today.

The new fake Elon Musk crypto giveaway scam popped up on Twitter and claimed a massive victim that got drained out of $550,000 for believing that the scammer will double the amount. While crypto scams were going around as long as crypto has, it’s not often that Twitter giveaway manages to accrue that much money. However, this is exactly what happened just recently when a scammer impersonated Elon Musk on Twitter and duped a man out of $550,000 worth of BTC. according to the BBC reports, the scammers replying to Musk’s tweet “Dojo 4 DOGE” shared links to a fake giveaway.

These links led to a professional-looking website that promoted an offer in which people are able to send Musk some BTC and then receive twice as much in return. The website offered to double the quantities between 0.1 and 20 BTC. however, the now-deleted page alleges that Tesla’s marketing department was organizing a giveaway where everyone that sends 4 BTC or 150 ETH was promised a Grand Prize- Tesla Model S. According to BBC, these types of scams have already made more than $18 million up to this date which is a huge increase from 2020 when the scammers netted $16 million for the entire year.

And it’s not just the scamming volume that has been increasing. The number of victims has been on the rise as well. the data from Whale Alert suggests that the number of victims this year will surpass the previous three years in total because in the first three months of this year already 5600 victims have fallen while in 2020 for the entire year, 10,500 fell victims to scams. Frank van Weert who is the founder of the Amsterdam-based Whale Alert said that it was quite impossible to explain why these scams have been increasing:

 “We don’t have any data to explain it, but it could be related to the wider Bitcoin market. When the Bitcoin price goes up, people go crazy and a lot of them are new to the market and they want this idea of quick money.”