According to Group-IB, a group of online scammers made approximately $1.7 million by promising cryptocurrency giveaways on YouTube.
The group allegedly aired 36 YouTube videos between February 16 and 18, gaining at least 165,000 views, according to the Singapore-based security company.
To give validity to their efforts, they included footage of tech entrepreneurs and crypto enthusiasts like Elon Musk, Brad Garlinghouse, Michael Saylor, Changpeng Zhao, and Cathie Wood.
According to Group-IB, the channels were either hacked or bought on the black market.
They included links to at least 29 websites with instructions on how to double cryptocurrency investments in the streams they built.
'Investors' were encouraged to send a tiny sum of virtual currency and promised that they would be paid back twice that amount.
Some victims were prompted to enter seed phrases to 'link' their wallets, depending on the cryptocurrency and wallet type utilised.
However, the fraudsters were able to take control of their wallet and withdraw all of their funds as a result of this.
The scammers received 281 transactions totalling nearly $1.7 million into their crypto wallets in just three days. The precise number of victims and the overall amount stolen, however, are unknown.
Group-IB stated, “The fake crypto giveaway scheme is not new, but apparently is still having a moment. Further analysis of the scammers’ domain infrastructure revealed that the 29 websites were part of a massive network of 583 interconnected resources all set up in the first quarter of 2022. Notably, there were three times as many domains registered for this scheme in less than three months of 2022 compared to the whole of last year.”
Crypto enthusiasts should be wary of freebies and avoid sharing personal information online, according to Group-IB. Users were also encouraged to double-check the authenticity of any promos and use a password manager to store any seed phrases.
