While millions of Americans still don't know who is the clear winner of the US presidential election as of Thursday, November 5, Tesla CEO Elon Musk decided to celebrate it early with fellow netizens on Twitter, including Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
But the problem is that the verified Twitter account from where 'Musk' responded to Trump and Biden's tweets does not belong to the real SpaceX CEO. It was found that the account changed its display name to Elon Musk and started a cryptocurrency scam. The operator behind this verified Twitter handle began responding to Trump and Biden's tweets to promote its scam.
The scammer said in a tweet while responding to Trump, "It is all but decided by now. In other words, it's over. To celebrate, we are giving to the people: go to the website: musk-coins. com" and then added "Hint: just remove the space".
The scammer replied to Biden's tweet saying that "Elections are almost over! And here goes a little something from me that I promised for the occasion." The tweet also added the website details and the person behind this scam advised people to "remove the space to get there".
Scam Alert
If someone had followed the tweet and visited the site mentioned in it, people would have found a fake page saying that the "marketing department here at Tesla HQ came up with an idea: to hold a special giveaway event for all crypto fans out there".
That particular website links to two other sites that trick people to send bitcoin and Ethereum with a false claim that they will get larger returns. As reported, the scammer soon changed the display name from "Elon Musk" to "." and that happened after the scammer apparently received nearly $32,000 worth of bitcoin and more than $6,000 worth of ether.
The interesting fact is the Twitter account once belonged to the Australian entrepreneur, Emma Isaacs who is the CEO of a company called Business Chicks, according to the Internet Archive.
The crypto scam incident took place on Wednesday, November 4. But Twitter failed to take immediate action as it promised in 2018 that the microblogging platform would automatically lock any account if it pretends to be Musk to control such scams.
