Hackers impersonating Elon Musk spread a fraudulent cryptocurrency scheme on Twitter

Cryptocurrency fraudsters took over the account of Mike Winder, a high-ranking US official in Utah, modified it to look like a prototype of Elon Musk’s original Twitter account and invited social media users to take part in the so-called «best cryptocurrency event.» Obviously, by clicking on the link in the tweet, users were endangering their cryptocurrency wallets.

The naked eye can see that the attackers misspelled the billionaire’s name, replacing the surname «Musk» with «Msuk». They also used unusual letters for the Latin alphabet. Probably, in this way, the scammers wanted to avoid Twitter’s algorithms that look for fake accounts or bots. The fraudsters tried to send identical messages in the reposts of various popular cryptocurrency accounts, including the famous digital artist Mike Winkelman (better known as Beeple) and the Binance exchange.

This is not the first time that cryptocurrency scammers have used the brands of famous people in the crypto industry to make money. This month, Cointelegraph identified 6 Twitter accounts with a profile verification checkbox that pretended to be Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin. The attackers targeted the funds of gullible investors. The Merge caused a wave of speculation on Ethereum and became a good opportunity for cryptocurrency fraudsters to get other people’s money.

As a reminder, Elon Musk has repeatedly called on Twitter management to pay attention to the number of bots on the social network (bots were one of the reasons for Musk’s termination of the Twitter acquisition). In addition to the Tesla CEO, Twitter users, the CEO of Binance, and a representative of the cryptocurrency Dogecoin have also drawn attention to this problem.