Deepfake Video Of Elon Musk Emerges Promoting Crypto Scam

A deepfake video of Elon Musk emerged and promoted a crypto scam which is not the first time scammers used Elon Musk to promote a scam so let’s read more about it in our latest cryptocurrency news.

A new cryptocurrency scam involving Elon Musk emerged but this one is a bit more creative as it used a deepfake video of Elon Musk. The latest scam featured a deepfake video of Elon Musk telling people to plug their cash into the illegitimate trading platform so the Tesla CEO was quick to warn that the video wasn’t real. The video featuring Elon Musk promised huge returns to invest in a dodgy crypto scheme that supposedly went viral.

Elon Musk's deep fake video promoting a new cryptocurrency scam going viral. The video claims that the trading platform is owned by Elon Musk, and offers 30% returns on crypto deposits. @elonmusk pic.twitter.com/iJeUvHYc5p

— DogeDesigner (@cb_doge) May 24, 2022

The video features a phony Musk talking about a new investment project in which people should put their money and make 30% dividends every day for the rest of their lives. The Deepfake is an increasingly common form of a video made with the help of AI technology that creates images of false events and in this case, the deepfake edits preivous footage of Elon Musk and make it seem that he is actually speaking in real-time. The scam was put out by BitVex as a fake trading crypto exchange.

The video is not too convincing as Musk’s voice is quite robotic and it’s hard to catch what he is saying exactly. Musk also runs an aerospace company dubbed SpaceX and also announced on Twitter that the video wasn’t real. Billy Markus, the co-founder of DOGE, chimed in about how bad the deepfake was:

“Someone stupid enough to invest in that deserves to lose their money, but at the same time the scammers deserve to spend their life in jail. Like literally anyone watching that and thinking it’s real would lose their money to anything.”

DOGE is the 11^th biggest crypto with a market cap of $11 billion and Elon Musk talked about it on Twitter many times.  Musk spent much of 2020 and 2021 pumping DOGE which was initially invented as a joke and caused its price to surge. Critics said the crypto asset doesn’t have any real utility but the developers are now working on making it useful for payments. Mark Cuban, another millionaire was pushing for DOGE to be used as a payment method for more than a year. Cuban’s NBA team started accepting DOGE for merch and tickets in 2021.

Scams in the crypto space were not something new but they are getting more sophisticated. In March there was a phishing scam that hacked verified accounts and managed to steal $1 million in the fake airdrop of Apecoin. In 2020, scammers hacked high profile accounts on Twitter including the one of Elon Musk to promote a bitcoin scam.