An anonymous user sent 10 BTC to scammers, who promised to double the amount sent from Elon Musk's fake Twitter account. It is reported by the BBC.
The interlocutor of the publication followed the cybercriminals' link in the comments to the publication of this chapter of Tesla. On a fraudulent website, he was asked to double the amount from 0.1 BTC to 20 BTC.
After making sure that the link was placed from a verified account, the investor began to think about the amount of the transaction: 5 BTC or 10 BTC.
Take it to the maximum, I thought, this is true. So I sent 10 BTC, ”said the anonymous author. The site promised that the funds would be received within 20 minutes - a special timer was counting down.
The user updated his wallet twice a minute in anticipation of a doubled amount but never received bitcoins.
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“I realized that this is all a big deception. I thought I had just thrown away a critical amount for my family, money for early retirement, and all the future holidays of my children. I went upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed to tell my wife. I woke her up and said that I had made a big mistake, a really big mistake,” he added.
The victim of the fraud wrote for several hours to the website's e-mail and the fake Elon Musk on Twitter, hoping to get back at least some of what he had lost.
According to the analytical service Whale Alert, 2021 became a record year in terms of the number of losses from fake cryptocurrency distributions. In less than three months, scammers stole $ 18 million against $ 16 million for the entire 2020.
As a reminder, Charles Hoskinson, the CEO of the IOHK company behind Cardano, has threatened a class-action lawsuit against YouTube and Twitter over cryptocurrency fraud on the platforms.
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Ripple has previously filed a similar lawsuit against YouTube. The reason was the fraudulent distribution of the XRP token, in which the CEO of the company Brad Garlinghouse often appeared.