Recently, another Facebook page was discovered using the name of Elon Musk, founder of Tesla, to carry out a cryptocurrency scam.
Earlier this November, a verified Facebook page was impersonating Elon Musk to launch a successful bitcoin scam.
Many people have fallen prey to it because of their confidence in the blue check mark on the account activated by Facebook.
The scam was caught shortly after.
While the page was not available on November 1, as reported by The Verge, the scam was not over yet, another page impersonating Elon Musk, whose verification flag has been activated again by Facebook, She managed to run a similar bitcoin scam.
The post, which was published on November 22 at 7 AM PST, has 1.3 thousand likes, 477 comments and 55 shares.
Ehraz Ahmed, a 25-year-old cybersecurity researcher, discovered this hoax and the identity of impersonators running a bitcoin scam.
Speaking to the Web News Observer, Ahmed said the page may have been verified by impersonating Aubrey Allegretti, a Sky News reporter.
An image showing the fake account of Elon Musk on Facebook (networking sites)
"I believe that fraudsters used fake documents to verify this page. The page's transparency section states that the page's name has been changed 5 times. At first, there were some Arabic names. Later, the name was changed to Aubrey Alegretti, which at that time was A political correspondent at Sky News according to his LinkedIn profile.Even the 'About' section of the page says the same - a political correspondent for Sky News."
The page was created on May 18, 2014, and underwent several name changes, until its name was finally changed to Elon Musk on November 10, 2021, along with his profile picture.
Currently, the page has 34,382 followers with 7 posts.
Ahmed added that once the hackers were able to verify the account, they changed the name to Elon Musk and started defrauding people.
An image showing the change of the page name after obtaining the approval code from Facebook (communication sites)
It all started with a suspicious post on Facebook.
The post contains only two words, #ADA coin.
About this, Ahmed says, “The scam was taking place in the comments where the scammers asked people to send bitcoins if they wanted to double it.”
He added that the people who administer the page from Europe "look at the page's transparency section, we can also tell that it's run by people who live in Spain and Germany".
But the shocking truth is that Ahmed believes the page is run by the same group that was responsible for Elon Musk's previous fake page.
He explained, "The username is the same as the previous one except that it contains an 'S'. Earlier it was Elon musk official and now Elon musk officis. This could mean that the same group is responsible for the second scam." .
Using a big name like Musk as bait on Facebook is attractive to trick people into sending bitcoin in cryptocurrency scams, and it points to the loopholes in Facebook's verification system that says they follow a strict verification process.
Not only on Facebook scammers use Elon Musk's name to make money easily, even Instagram has been a place for similar scams.
However, these accounts have not been verified.
Although Bitcoin scams are nothing new, the fact that these malicious entities are able to play with Facebook's verification system and not know that these accounts are fake, is troubling.