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Another fake ‘verified’ page of Elon Musk pops up in crypto scam
Weeks after social media networking site Facebook identified an account being run by scammers on the name of Tesla owner Elon Musk, another verified account has popped up on the site with the same name reportedly running scams related to cryptocurrency.
The account has a blue tick and has followers over 71k and the account follows 57 users.
Musk is the CEO of Tesla Motors, and his name is used as the page’s name with a little tweak in the spelling of Elon Musk – it is written as ‘ellonnmusk’.
However, the user name on the account appears as ‘Elon Musk’.
The fake page was red-flagged by a 25–year-old security researcher, Ehraz Ahmed, who was responsible for busting the earlier scam as well.
Ahmed told the online news portal Web News Observer that he suspects the new page is being operated by the same scammers as before. The current page has over 70,000 followers, but a sub-par rating of 3.6 stars.
“By visiting the Page Transparency section, I noticed that this page, unlike the previous ones, was created back in May 2015. The location of the admins is, once again, Germany and Spain, which may mean that these scammers are the same people who were behind the previous similar scams,” Ahmed was quoted as saying by the report.
The Page Transparency section shows that the name of this page hasn’t changed at all since it was set up on May 6, 2015.
Quoting Ahmed, the report said, “It was created by the name of Elon Musk and must have been verified with his name only. However, a point of concern is the fact that the scammers might have used the fake documents of Musk to get this page verified”.
Ahmed added that it is still unclear as to what the scammers have in mind this time, but that it is “obvious is that it is yet another Cryptocurrency scam”.
The page appears to have become active only after the previous page was taken down, on November 26 this year. It has about 20 posts, all of which appear to be quite similar to Musk’s posts on Twitter, the report said.
People appear to have wised up to the scam, however going by the page reviews, which clearly call the page out for being fake.
“This is true that people are becoming aware of such scams, however, there’s still a long way to go. While many are smart enough to give a fraud alert in the page recommendation section, there are still a lot of people who are all excited to know more about this so-called new coin,” the report quoted Ahmed further saying.
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