Using a “double your funding” scheme, threat actors once again are luring their victims with the promise of high Bitcoin profits. Millions of dollars have been stolen with the help of fake endorsements from the prominent faces of Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and Cathie Wood.
The unknown fraudsters made more than $1.3 million in just a few weeks after re-streaming an edited model of an old live panel dialogue on cryptocurrency with Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, and Cathie Wood at Ark Invest’s “The ₿ Word” convention.
Cybersecurity analysts from cybersecurity firm McAfee have published a report on this, in which they spotted 11 fraudulent websites linked to the videos. McAfee updated the report after it was published to say that the number of these websites had elevated to 26 in just 24 hours.
“The YouTube streams promoted several websites with a similar theme. They claim to send cryptocurrencies at twice the value received. For example, if you send 1BTC, you will receive 2BTC back,” said McAfee.
Additionally, researchers examined the crypto wallets associated with the sites to which the victims had to send their “investment”. For example, on May 5, there were trades worth $280,000. Total damage was estimated at $1.3 million. Numbered, but there are certainly a significant number of other victims.
Bleeping Computer also uncovered about 10 YouTube channels reposting the manipulated discussion. The title of just about all of them included the strings Tesla, Elon Musk, Ark Invest, or a mixture of them. Interestingly, a few of these channels selling a cryptocurrency rip-off website have massive followership, between 71,000 and 1.08 million subscribers.
In the majority of cases, the number of subscribers for these channels seems to have been artificially blown so as to add credibility to the videos promoting the scam, since they haven’t any different content material out there.
Previously, fraudsters used different movies associated with Elon Musk, together with SpaceX launches or Tesla movies, to efficiently promote pretend giveaways and earn hundreds of thousands of dollars.
In 2020, Brad Garlinghouse, CEO of financial tech firm Ripple filed a lawsuit against YouTube for failing to remove fake videos featuring his name. Last March, he ended up settling with the tech giant. YouTube claimed that it wasn’t responsible for the content third parties published on its platform.