Social media, a very popular conveyor of cryptocurrency knowledge has served as a platform to connect people around the world over the years. Nonetheless, deepfakes abound!
The CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk has expressed shock at another fabricated video of him promoting a cryptocurrency scam.
As seen on Twitter, the video shows Elon Musk promoting a cryptocurrency platform, assuring them of 30% returns on each crypto deposit. Investor king realized that the video was originally a TED talk featuring Elon Musk and curator Chris Anderson at a TED conference in Vancouver in April this year.
Musk’s prominent personality as a technology pioneer has made him the target of cryptocurrency scammers to dupe inexperienced social media users and investors by promising them unrealistic returns on investments.
Reacting to the tweet and video, Musk who has moved to acquire Twitter for an estimated $44 billion replied in a comical manner “Yikes!, Def not me.”
In 2020 and 2021, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) released a report that shows over $80 million estimated worth of cryptocurrency stolen by scammers from unsuspecting victims within a period of six months.
The commission Consumer Sentinel noted that most of the scams arose from impersonation where artists pose as a cryptocurrency influencers and promise to multiply the deposits investors send to their wallets.
According to the report, More than $ 2 million was sent to Musk impersonators in six months as they set fraudulent live streams on YouTube targeting viewers searching for “Elon Musk SNL.” These bogus broadcasts promoted links to spurious websites that viewers could purportedly visit to receive Dogecoin, with one claiming: “Elon Musk has devoted 500,000,000 DOGE to be distributed to all DOGE holders. Anybody can get some, just visit the website.” the report reads
Deepfake is a term coined in 2017 used to describe a video, image or audio of a person generated by artificial intelligence with the aim of manipulating, deceiving and scamming viewers.
Musk in his TED talk earlier this year has vowed to reduce the alarming numbers of spam and scam bots on twitter that have ripped users of millions in past years: “A top priority I would have is eliminating the spam and scam bots and the bot armies that are on Twitter. They make the product much worse. If I had a Dogecoin for every crypto scam I saw, we’d have 100 billion Dogecoin.”
