For years I have written about Twitter and Facebook scams involving a number of celebrities such as Dwayne Johnson, Tyler Perry and Elon Musk.  Posing as a famous person on social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram is quite simple to do and has proven to be quite lucrative for many scammers who are able to convince unsuspecting victims to rely on the phony accounts. Setting up a social media account is easy to do for a scammer requiring merely a name, a photo and an email address, all of which can be done to make it appear that the account is that of the real celebrity when, in truth it is that of the scammer. Sometimes the scammer will add a middle initial or a slight misspelling of the name of the celebrity to avoid detection. There are even companies that for a few dollars will set up phony celebrity social media accounts for scammers. Despite the efforts of the various social media companies to try to stop this practice, it continues in great numbers. Facebook estimates that there are as many as 60 million phony Facebook accounts including hundreds of its founder Mark Zuckerberg. It tries to remove the accounts when it becomes aware of them, but they spring up soon again.

Elon Musk, in particular has had his name used for many of these impersonation scams.  Recently, the tech news site Gizmodo used a Freedom of Information Act request to get copies of complaints made to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) by people who were victims of Elon Musk impersonation scams and the FTC identified thousands in just the last year.

In 2021 I told you about a man in the UK  who was scammed into sending 400,000 pounds (551,400 in dollars) to a scammer posing as Elon Musk using a technique done previously and about which I told you in 2018.  In the 2018 version of the Elon Musk Twitter scam a Twitter thread started by the real Elon Musk using his Twitter handle of @elonmusk is responded to by someone using the handle of @ElonMsk, which also carries a photo of Elon Musk. Someone looking at it quickly may not recognize that it is not the Twitter handle of Elon Musk and is missing the letter “u.” The Tweet states, “I’m donating 20 Bitcoin to everyone who sends .02 BTC to the address below. First 40 transactions with 0.02 BTC sent to the address below will each receive 0.5 BTC to the address the 0.02 BTC came from.”   In the 2021 version of the scam, the scammers used their phony Musk Twitter account to participate in a giveaway by Musk’s Tesla company in which people would send Bitcoins and get ten times the amount of their Bitcoins in return.  Falling for this scam caused the UK victim to lose the entire 400,000 pounds he sent to a Bitcoin account of the scammers.

TIPS

If it looks too good to be true, it usually is. These scams are really just another incarnation of the Nigerian email scam. No celebrity including Elon Musk is giving away free prizes and no one is giving anyone 20 Bitcoins in return for .02 Bitcoins.  Always look carefully at Twitter threads   (I know it is X, but it is still difficult for me to refer to it as X) when responding. You should never trust a social media account of a celebrity or anyone for that matter that promises to give you something for nothing. No celebrity is giving gifts to total strangers, not even Oprah Winfrey, whose generosity is well known and whose name was used to perpetrate these scams, as well. Trust me, you can’t trust anyone.

Whenever you see one of these free giveaways appear in social media be a little skeptical and don’t provide any personal information. Certainly don’t give away any credit card information, don’t send any Bitcoins and don’t click on unverified links.

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