After Elon Musk bought Twitter in October 2022, I started to notice a big uptick in scammers trying to sell cryptocurrency by using photos of the billionaire. I wrote about the problem back in January, February and March. But Twitter is still littered with the same scams. So let’s take a look at the one I 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 check mark, which means anyone with a few dollars can buy “verification.”
The Twitter user’s bio includes a jumble of words without spaces, which may indicate it was created in an automated fashion: “Son,husband,father,grandfather – I learn something new each day!”
The Twitter ad features a photo of Musk with his arms folded and the words “SpaceX Token Presale is Live.” Clicking on the ad brings the user to a landing page that’s made to look like a news outlet or blog. The domain is even hosted at telegra.ph, presumably to make it look like a reputable news site such as The Telegraph, a newspaper in Britain. But the .ph top level domain is for the country of the Philippines.
The text of the landing page claims Elon Musk has announced the launch of a new cryptocurrency token associated with SpaceX, something that simply isn’t true.
“Breaking news for 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 website reads.
The website explains that people can purchase the crypto for “$1.70 per token,” which it suggests is some kind of deal.
“Investing in the SpaceX Token not only offers the chance to shape the future of space exploration and blockchain technology, but also the opportunity to win incredible prizes, including a 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,” the fake news outlet page reads.
If that all sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. There’s also a link on the landing page to direct users to an area where they can purchase the scam crypto. That website, which is hosted at spacexcrypto.com, arguably looks much more polished that the fake Telegraph page.
Why is there a landing page at all? Why doesn’t the Twitter ad simply direct to the fake SpaceX page? I suspect it has something to do with the way Twitter screens ads. Twitter can presumably blacklist any ads that link to a site like spacexcrypto.com, which is where the current scam leads. But by directing the user first to a site like telegra.ph, or any other number of news-themed landing pages set up by the scammers, it’s harder to block the scammers.
As I mentioned, I’ve seen a lot of these scam ads this year. It’s not clear how much money Twitter may be making off these scams. Twitter did not respond to questions emailed on Sunday. I’ll update this article if I hear back.
Whatever you do, don’t try to buy SpaceX crypto. It’s a scam. And given how common the ads are on Twitter, it’s a scam that at least some people must be falling for.
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