Breaking down the anatomy of a fake giveaway scam

[cryptomaniac_xxx]

I would just like to break down why of all the people, Elon Musk is the number person that they love to impersonate. He is not even a crypto personality for Christ sake. But why it is very effective? It boils down to what we now known as trust trading.

Trust scam trading - is a technique used by scammers to impersonate, well-known personalities, because of their influence and wealth in this case Elon Musk. And we are now familiar with those fake giveaways, like - "We are doing a giveaways, send us .1 BTC and we will send you back .5 BTC." And we all know that Elon Musk fake btc giveaway is the most common. And even a experience crypto investors could really fall for it.

And these scammers are using Twitter, Youtube as their grounds to spread it. They can hack someones Youtube account with tons of subcribers, edit and used Space-X logo or Tesla's logo and then they are good to go and people doesn't check if everything is right because they "trust" it, after-all it's Elon Musk who are giving them free money.



Sample image of a scam giveaways with Elon Musk face in Youtube

So it boils down to individual seeing a personality such as Elon Musk, who have built a empire and simply believing them.

But if can really save us all if we are going to dig further and investigate more deeply.

1. Google - try to search first, but I'm sure you will get that this is a scam
2. Youtube - look at the profile, look for tell tale signs that probably the account has been hack. For example if the previous uploads doesn't even mention about Elon or crypto, then that is a red flag
3. Analyse the website itself, used domaintools or you can see the following links to help you out.

[Guide] How to find domain name registrar
[Guide] Best way to Archive Bitcointalk and other webpages
[Guide]: How and Where to Report Phishing Websites

There are a lot of crypto personalities as well, specially Vitalik Buterin of ETH which I think is the second most impersonate personalities using trust trading scam.

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[Charles-Tim]

Trust scam trading - is a technique used by scammers to impersonate, well-known personalities, because of their influence and wealth in this case Elon Musk. And we are now familiar with those fake giveaways, like - "We are doing a giveaways, send us .1 BTC and we will send you back .5 BTC." And we all know that Elon Musk fake btc giveaway is the most common. And even a experience crypto investors could really fall for it.

Yes, if the experienced investor is greedy, he will be scammed. But, also if truly the person is experienced, he ought not to fall for it as we know how free giveaways like doublers and the likes are fake. But, newbies are the ones that are mostly scammed this way, I supposed to have fallen for this scam when I first know about bitcoin, but thank God, I did not have money to even pay into the scammer's bitcoin address. So, newbies are falling victim to the scams that serve as lesson for us.

Also, we need to know that even any legit site can contain ads to these fake giveaways, that is why we should be careful of ads. Lastly, the more we are getting richer, there more we should be very careful.

[tbct_mt2]

They (scammers) use same scam giveaway type. They only change the names of celebrities, from Vitalik to Elon Musk and more. I do believe that scammers know what victims have in common. Have you ever thought that scammers even do anatomy on their target victims?

Scammers on Youtube. Don't fall into this scam trap and lose money, guys
Youtube scam channels. Please spend your time to report them and take them down

[Findingnemo]

No experienced crypto investor is going to fall for such shit scam traps, and it almost getting blatant these days only people who are new and no idea about the crypto investments are rushing to buy bitcoins and send it to these address.And also I doubt not much people are going to give attention to these because this idea is already getting reluctant and existing here for years.

[Dragonfund]

No experienced crypto investor is going to fall for such shit scam traps, and it almost getting blatant these days only people who are new and no idea about the crypto investments are rushing to buy bitcoins and send it to these address.And also I doubt not much people are going to give attention to these because this idea is already getting reluctant and existing here for years.

Believe me, there are naive people out there that will fall for this. Recall the event of twitter hacked that happened of recent in just few hours, do you know the number of people that fall to that fake giveaway?
All we can do is to keep reporting, it will fade away with time but that doesn't mean we should overlook.

[seoincorporation]

People should understand money doesn't grow in trees. if someone offers an easy x2 or a bigger multiplier, then we should ask ourselves about if we can trust that promotion. If it looks too good to be real then it's a trap. The only way to trust this kind of promotions is of the source is trusted and legit. we can't trust google or youtube with cryptos. They allow the scammers to work without problems.

[Findingnemo]

No experienced crypto investor is going to fall for such shit scam traps, and it almost getting blatant these days only people who are new and no idea about the crypto investments are rushing to buy bitcoins and send it to these address.And also I doubt not much people are going to give attention to these because this idea is already getting reluctant and existing here for years.

Believe me, there are naive people out there that will fall for this. Recall the event of twitter hacked that happened of recent in just few hours, do you know the number of people that fall to that fake giveaway?
All we can do is to keep reporting, it will fade away with time but that doesn't mean we should overlook.

In the twitter hack there maybe few crypto investors become victims but in the youtube giveaways where no previous videos will be available and they uses bot views to get live count views into thousands just to attract the poor greedy people.

[Saisher]

The big concern here is the hacking if they cannot hack those accounts they will not have platform to use for their giveaways, it's time for these YouTube owners and influencers to tighten their securities and Youtube to watch for channels that are hacked it's either they hacked it or it was sold to them, because if you have thousands of subscribers you know that security is your priority.

[CryptocurencyKing]

It all boils down to the trust system. It's so unfair what these scammers do with people's hard earned time to have built something personable and reasonable for themselves and for their selfish and untrimmed lifestyle damages a persons personality and lays waste to the trust system.
One issue is, people still fall to these cheap scams in the form of giveaways. If the people can really develop an urge to satisfy what they get by working had for it, it would help else the problem of scammers as we have today.
I mean, how can you expect to double your one year effort in a week without some stress...?
We shouldn't trust so easily and should put our greed in check else, we would choke on it.

[GeorgeJohn]

People should understand money doesn't grow in trees. if someone offers an easy x2 or a bigger multiplier, then we should ask ourselves about if we can trust that promotion. If it looks too good to be real then it's a trap. The only way to trust this kind of promotions is of the source is trusted and legit. we can't trust google or youtube with cryptos. They allow the scammers to work without problems.

The problem we are having currently is much advertisements in social media's peoples always believe on what them see in social media platform's
And all their mind set is that provide is online is accurate, not knowing that social media is were people been scammed easily.
To be sincer what you said is right,
Let us try to avoid some information's from Instagram and Twitter,before it will wipe all our money, because scammers house is  Instagram.

[cryptomaniac_xxx]

No experienced crypto investor is going to fall for such shit scam traps, and it almost getting blatant these days only people who are new and no idea about the crypto investments are rushing to buy bitcoins and send it to these address.And also I doubt not much people are going to give attention to these because this idea is already getting reluctant and existing here for years.

Believe me, there are naive people out there that will fall for this. Recall the event of twitter hacked that happened of recent in just few hours, do you know the number of people that fall to that fake giveaway?
All we can do is to keep reporting, it will fade away with time but that doesn't mean we should overlook.

In the twitter hack there maybe few crypto investors become victims but in the youtube giveaways where no previous videos will be available and they uses bot views to get live count views into thousands just to attract the poor greedy people.

I think you miss my point here, it is not about being greedy, it's about seeing personalities like Elon Musk and trusting them with their own money. And I also do believed that experience people can still fall for it specially seeing the image of Musk supposedly promoting it, that's why it's called trust scam trading.

[Assface16678]

There are a lot of people right now seeing this on youtube for some reason.

1. Really want to search about bitcoin giveaway.
2. Unexpected while searching around with the youtube platform.

Right now most of us on our forum are on the first option its looks like we are a hunter just want to report this kind of scam because we want to avoid many newbies getting involved in this scam.

Still, the reason why Elon musk is he is one of the most common because the number of projects he has right now and also recently is the SpaceX being popular even in the world of investment is one of the strategies to scam other people not only Elon but the people who are good in sports and even on showbiz because many people supporting them easy to encourage this is a true event.

[DdmrDdmr]

The specific case cited in the OP was allegedly carried out by the hackers who, after some social media stunt, managed to get their hands on a Twitter internal tool, managing thus to bypass the 2FA security procedure that many of the individual hacked account had.
If this reigning theory is true, most likely Twitter could have done more in terms of security. Nowadays, a corporation can ensure pretty well that a corporate system is only accessed from a corporate machine (via 2fa + vpn + corporate machine compliancy checks), narrowing down the possibilities of and action of the type from an outsider.

In any case, the Trust implied in the OP’s case is double, placed on: the (wrongly alleged) message emitter himself (Elon Musk), and the platform being used to echo the scam (Twitter verified official account). Whilst most scams can only resort to impersonating the former, or even the latter (i.e. Telegram Admin account takeovers in ICOs) this case has both trust vectors in place, making it more feasible, even if by a stretch.

What can’t be overcome is the inbuilt gullibility of some people, which is probably related to a certain (overcomable) ignorance of the way these things work, alongside a crypyo-aurora fallacy whereby people believe that you can get actually get rich on crypto in a blink of an eye. Add to that a FOMO of a great deal, which places the pressure on acting and not investigating when logic and experience do not bar the option from the start.

[Findingnemo]

snip~
I think you miss my point here, it is not about being greedy, it's about seeing personalities like Elon Musk and trusting them with their own money. And I also do believed that experience people can still fall for it specially seeing the image of Musk supposedly promoting it, that's why it's called trust scam trading.

Anyone with common sense will have a question to them when they see such kind of promotions, which is Why they should give us free money? If they really wanted then why they are asking for some amount to double it!

As I said twitter hack caused millions to lose because the tweet was from his official account but on Youtube random channel with loop video of something related to Youtbe should not be given that much attention!

[DdmrDdmr]

We can rest assure … (Paul Rockwell, LinkedIn  - Head of Trust and Safety):

"We actively seek out signs of state-sponsored activity on the platform and quickly take action against bad actors in order to protect our members. We don't wait on requests, our threat intelligence team removes fake accounts using information we uncover and intelligence from a variety of sources, including government agencies. Our teams utilize a variety of automated technologies, combined with a trained team of reviewers and member reporting, to keep our members safe from all types of bad actors. We enforce our policies, which are very clear: the creation of a fake account or fraudulent activity with an intent to mislead or lie to our members is a violation of our terms of service."

See: https://www.zdnet.com/article/lazarus-group-strikes-cryptocurrency-firm-through-linkedin-job-adverts/

As a side note, Linked-in is subject to Trust related scams, built precisely on the fact that people add others to their networks, often without paying too much care. This article (I know, it’s from The Sun, but it’s not just about titties on page 3 anymore since 2015) depicts how scam accounts target getting into circles from given companies, with fake profiles, pretending to work at those companies. Once they manage that, they move on to try some social engineering, piggybacking on the Trust that their contact network has given them to carry out their scams:
https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/12469046/friend-request-fraud-what-to-watch-out-for/

Consider al social networks social potentials for scamming through rough accounts at some point (and Linked-in is one after all).

[Lordhermes]

It's a really deep thing and hard work to let new comers everyday into the crypto space wandering about quick amount of money in a blink of eye, this forum is a suitable protective tools against this seeming legit scammers, not evey new crypto enthusiast is aware of this dude impersonating Elon Musk so its possible these bloody scammers gets them periodically, because of lack of information and knowledge which is purely the successful tools.
Twitter and YouTube protective policy is an overlook thing performed by various persons with huge subscribers and followers, such account is at risk and in many area scammers are asking to buying/hacking such account. A good high standard security and privacy policy step should be respectively considered at all cost in resisting hackers at any giving point in time.

[tbct_mt2]

It's a really deep thing and hard work to let new comers everyday into the crypto space wandering about quick amount of money in a blink of eye, this forum is a suitable protective tools against this seeming legit scammers, not evey new crypto enthusiast is aware of this dude impersonating Elon Musk so its possible these bloody scammers gets them periodically, because of lack of information and knowledge which is purely the successful tools.

I have never read somewhere else 'legit scammers'. I made me laugh a lot.

Twitter and YouTube protective policy is an overlook thing performed by various persons with huge subscribers and followers, such account is at risk and in many area scammers are asking to buying/hacking such account. A good high standard security and privacy policy step should be respectively considered at all cost in resisting hackers at any giving point in time.

Each platform has its own policies to detect (lessen and tighten when time goes), ban scammers but it is personal responsibility to protect ourselves. We can not and should not rely on platform policies and their responses to scammers' advertisements and scam projects. They pop up suddenly and there is no solid guarentee that any platform will detect them instantly and take actions to ban them immediately after that.

[Rikafip]

Anyone with common sense will have a question to them when they see such kind of promotions, which is Why they should give us free money? If they really wanted then why they are asking for some amount to double it!

There is a constant influx of new people in crypto and a lot of them heard stories about people getting rich, either by buying bitcoin early or investing in one of the shitcoins that eventually "mooned". They are led by pure greed, they have no idea what cryptocurrencies really are, they are not interested in all that decentralisation story, all they want is money.

And when you combine ignorance and greediness, then you get what we see now, people falling for most basic scam, as that's what these giveaways are.