After Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, I started noticing a huge increase in scammers trying to sell cryptocurrency using billionaire photos. I wrote about the problem in January, February and March. But Twitter is still full of the same scams. So let’s take a look at the ones you saw yesterday.
The crypto ad was purchased by a so-called “verified” user on Twitter by an account called Mr. Chips. The problem, of course, is that Twitter no longer verifies the identity of any user on the platform. Musk decided to charge $8 per month for the blue checkmark, which means anyone with a few bucks can buy Proof.
A Twitter user’s bio includes a jumble of words without spaces, which might indicate that it was automated: “Son, husband, father, grandfather – I learn something new every day!”
The Twitter ad shows an image of Musk with his arms folded and the words “SpaceX Token Presale is Live.” Clicking the ad takes the user to a landing page designed to look like a news outlet or blog. The domain is hosted on telegra.ph, presumably to make it look like a reputable news site like The Telegraph, a newspaper in Britain. But the .ph top-level domain is for the Philippines.
The text of the landing page claims that Elon Musk has announced the launch of a new SpaceX-related cryptocurrency token, which is simply not true.
“Breaking news to all crypto investors around the world! The visionary CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, has just announced the launch of the official SpaceX token, and the pre-sale is now open for a limited time only.”
The site states that people can buy the cryptocurrency for “$1.70 per token,” which indicates that it is some kind of transaction.
“Investing in SpaceX token offers not only an opportunity to shape the future of space exploration and blockchain technology, but also the chance to win amazing prizes, including the chance to visit Mars. Lucky token holders will have the chance to win prizes from Tesla, The Boring Company and Neuralink, as well as an exclusive trip to the Red Planet.”
If all of this sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. There is also a link on the landing page to direct users to an area where they can buy scam crypto. This site, which is hosted at spacexcrypto.com, looks arguably more polished than the fake Telegraph page.
Why is there a landing page at all? Why not simply point a Twitter ad to the fake SpaceX page? I suspect it has something to do with the way Twitter sees ads. Twitter is supposed to blacklist any ads associated with a site like spacexcrypto.com, which is where the current scam leads. But by first directing the user to a site like telegra.ph, or any other number of news-themed landing pages created by the scammers, it is more difficult to prevent the scammers.
Like I mentioned, I’ve seen a lot of these scam ads this year. It is not clear how much money Twitter may be making from these scams. Twitter did not respond to emailed questions on Sunday. I will update this article if I hear back.
Whatever you do, don’t try to buy SpaceX crypto. It’s a scam. And considering how common ads are on Twitter, this is a scam that at least some people are bound to fall for.
Follow me Twitter. paying off my website.
[ad_2]