On the basis of the documentation sorted out by Adaptiv, confidential info was revealed regarding bitcoin. Scammers made the use of the name of Chief Executive Officer of Tesla Incorporated, Elon Musk, in order to gain 2 million USD in Bitcoin in two months.
Details on the Incident
At press time, Justin Lister, who is the CEO of the cybersecurity firm, spoke out to ZDNet that they kept an eye on 66 so-called Bitcoin “vanity addresses” that put the name of the billionaire entrepreneur to wrong use.
Since receiving the spreadsheet from Justin Lister earlier that week, a 67th Elon Musk vanity address was also submitted to the BitcoinAbuse website. He also added that this vanity address held an extra 13.9 Bitcoin, which made a total of 214 bitcoin. It carried the value of a little more than 2 million USD.
However, the investigation was not a Tough One
If it is considered the low effort needed to process one of these scams, the amount of 2 million USD is huge. The investigation of some of these rackets’ sources became way easier because BitcoinAbuse also asks the users to input a brief description of where they first encountered the Bitcoin address.
ZDNet also made the report on this that the vanity addresses have phrases that contained “Elon Musk” or other words that sounded similar. For instance, “1ELonMUsKZzpVr5Xok8abiXhhqGbdrnK5C.”
Even YouTube Accounts were not Spared
The complaints studied by Adaptive also led to the belief that the scammers make the use of live streams at Alphabet Incorporated’s video platform on YouTube. The motive behind this was simple, persuading in unsuspecting users.
In order to accomplish the scams against various odds, they used well-known accounts on YouTube with a large following. They changed the account names and graphics for bearing a resemblance to those of celebrities, here like Elon Musk.
This is an Important Revelation
If you think that this must be something huge in the wrong way, you may get surprised to know that this is not the first time. Even before this muddling incident, a group of scammers has made the use of Tesla’s CEO to bring in a profit in cryptocurrencies.
As a matter of fact, the very own post on Elon Musk on the popular social media platform of Twitter sees “giveaway” scams in top replies on a number of occasions.
Unauthorized Access was Even Seen Before
In 2018, the verified Twitter account of the world-famous celebrity chef Tyler Florence was hacked in October. They used to promote similar cryptocurrency scams in the name of Elon Musk. This is completely based on the verified report made by The Next Web.
In July 2018, Tesla’s CEO went along with the scams in one of his tweets. In his tweet, he said particularly admiring the ones pulling off scams related to the second-largest cryptocurrency of the world called Ethereum.
Price Action
Tesla shares shut down 0.3% lower at $1000.90 on June 19, 2020 (Friday). The shares marketed another 0.9% in the session after the licensed opening hours at $991.90. Bitcoin was mostly kept unaltered for more than 24 hours at $9360.32 at press time on June 22. That was all about the scam regarding Bitcoin that unluckily involved Musk. Hopefully, you got all the points you were looking for.