Elon Musk Deep Fake Promoting Fraudulent Crypto Trading Platform

With a surging amount of interest being given to the crypto space in recent times, bad players in the industry continue to devise new ways to defraud unsuspecting investors of their funds. 

According to researchers at BleepingComputer, these scammers are currently using deep fake videos of popular crypto proponents to promote a fraudulent crypto trading platform, dubbed BitVex.

The platform claims to be owned by Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk and promises to allow every investor who signed up to earn up to 30% returns on their crypto deposits.

The campaign for BitVex reportedly began in early May, with threat actors either hacking existing YouTube accounts or creating new ones to promote the platform using deep fake videos of Elon Musk, Michael Saylor, Charles Hoskinson, Cathie Wood, and Brad Garlinghouse.

Per the report, the scammers take legitimate interview clips with these prominent crypto advocates and modify them using deep fake software to alter what is said during the real interview with low-quality scripts provided by the threat actors.

But despite how hard they tried to modify the person’s mouth movements to try and appear realistic, the low-quality scripts are a dead giveaway that the interviews are not real.

The report added,

“Once you visit the BitVex trading site itself, it becomes more apparent that this is a scam. For example, the site claims that Elon Musk is the CEO of the trading platform and contains endorsements from Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.”

Like all fraudulent crypto investment platforms, the exchange’s official website displays fake earnings of investors in a bid to entice new investors to make their crypto deposits. However, BleepingComputer pointed out that these withdrawals “are randomly created by JavaScript.”

Nonetheless, the scam appears to have a low success rate as it has only been able to receive $1,700 in crypto deposits. The report noted that it could have stolen more since the campaign launched, considering that the addresses are likely rotated.

Not The First Time

With the rising popularity of the crypto space, several fraudulent schemes have sprung up, promising investors outrageous returns on investment in a short time. However, as investors get smarter and can point out these frauds, the scammers have also devised sophisticated means of defrauding investors.

So, to make their platforms and offer more enticing, they have resorted to using prominent crypto advocates. Last year, a fake Elon Musk giveaway ripped a German investor of 10 BTC, worth over $550,000 at the time.

Another fake bitcoin giveaway platform posing as MicroStrategy amassed over $400,000 from investors.