Americans are losing millions of dollars a year to cryptocurrency trading scams after falling victim to fake social media adverts deceitfully linking themselves to Elon Musk.
Some victims believed they were in direct contact with Musk, while others fell foul of common social media crypto scams they thought were endorsed by the billionaire.
Tech news site Gizmodo filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Federal Trade Commission and obtained some 247 complaints about crypto scams that ‘pretend to be affiliated with Musk’.
The complaints were filed within the last nine months alone, between February and October.
The losses reported by Gizmo range from an eye-watering $700,000 to smaller figures of $10,785.
The fraudulent ads target Musk fans by featuring his major companies including SpaceX, Tesla, and X, formerly Twitter.
Others capitalized on Musk’s association with presidential candidate Donald Trump.
One victim lost $700,000 dollars to a crypto scammer (Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
One New Yorker, who considers herself to be an ‘intelligent woman’ and a ‘huge fan’ of Musk and Tesla, reported losing $100,000 after ‘attempting to research the Juniper Tesla Model Y,’ due to be released in 2025.
She stumbled upon a video purportedly of Musk talking at a cryptocurrency convention, prompting people to scan a QR code on the screen which takes people to a website that promises to double the crypto they invest – a pretty common tactic used by scammers.
The woman, aged between 50 and 59, said in her complaint: “I only bit into this because it did sound too good to be true. Because it was Elon Musk, and he was on stage and it was live, and it looked like him and it sounded like him and all his words promoting this technology was so believable and everything that I believe in.”
After transferring her Bitcoin, however, she ‘realized she was being scammed’.
Some victims believed they were directly messaging Elon Musk (Chesnot/Getty Images)
The largest reported loss of the past nine months was almost three quarter of a million dollars.
The victim reports responding to what he believed was Elon Musk’s day trading commercial on Instagram. He then got a phone call and was guided by the scammer to trade via the XT-BestSolutions platform.
Another man lost a huge $618,000 after seeing a Facebook link that claimed Musk was looking for people to invest in an AI business.
This lead the man to be scammed via WhatsApp, where he was instructed to make a total of 13 wire transfers via two different trading apps.
UNILAD has contacted Tesla and Elon Musk’s representatives for further comment.
