Old Fake Crypto Giveaway Scam Still Makes $500K Per Week

An old fake crypto giveaway scam is still making up to $500K per week with people still believing the high-return schemes as we can read more in today’s crypto news.

As hard as it seems, there are still people that believe Elon Musk or some other celebrity will give them money if they send him some BTC, and this scheme was revived over the past few days as an old fake crypto giveaway scam that attracted unwary new people to it. Bleeping Computer and Metamask estimated that in about a week, scammers received about $587,000 from unsuspecting innocents using the old “send me X amount of crypto and I will double it” scheme.

Over the past few weeks, there were plenty of bots impersonating Twitter accounts and these bots claimed to have received money from great crypto celebrities like the Winklevoss twins or Elon Musk and attack a new link to a giveaway which invites people to deposit money to a crypto address and to receive double the amount:

“Have you seen this event yet? Elon made me a rich person! Check it out ASAP! pic.twitter.com/H0oct7T6gn

— Kat Odell (@kat_odell) January 14, 2021”

Some of the more popular addresses collected a few thousand dollars, with one in particular received about $400 in just a few days. Crypto scammers also accept Ethereum even though they make smaller amounts of money with this altcoin. Scammers usually go to other platforms like Facebook, YouTube, or Twitch and to collect even more money from victims. Ripple tried to take actions against YouTube that allowed scammers to launch fake giveaway videos as paid advertisements but this initiative didn’t take off with complaints about scams involving Elon Musk appear from time to time to other streaming platforms as well.

This type of scam is not something new and it is probably the best-known scam in the crypto space. They started spreading it in late 2017 to late 2018 in the middle of the crypto boom as at that time, the scammers posed as the original crypto personalities like Vitalik Buterin or Charlie Lee. Users perceived the rely on as a tweet from the original accounts and sent their funds. Several other influencers changed their names to specify that they will never send funds to anyone.