New "Elon Musk Club" crypto giveaway scam promoted via email

[The_King]

Content source

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-elon-musk-club-crypto-giveaway-scam-promoted-via-email/

A new Elon Musk-themed cryptocurrency giveaway scam called the "Elon Musk Mutual Aid Fund" or "Elon Musk Club" is being promoted through spam email campaigns that started over the past few weeks.

Before you dismiss these scams, saying that no one falls for them, similar crypto scams have been hugely successful and have generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in the past.

For example, scammers made $180K in a single day in 2018, Twitter suffered a massive attack where crypto scammers earned $580K in a week in January 2021, and then another scam stole $145K in February.

Just last week, someone sent three bitcoin, or $150,074 at the time, to a known crypto giveaway scam.

The Elon Musk Club scam​

While most cryptocurrency scams target social media users, scammers now use email spam to promote a new "Elon Musk Club" or "Elon Musk Mutual Aid Fund" giveaway.

However, these bitcoin addresses are owned by the scammers who take your "donation" but do not send anything in return.

So far, BleepingComputer has seen two bitcoin addresses associated with these scams:

• 32hU2JrkmMmgmka2rUuKXc3yd3S9WKxWnp received 73 transactions of 0.05734407 bitcoins, worth approximately $2,731.98.
• 3EbUB9wdQCxJwW5neH3xnTGjuoCA8THU5D received 23 transactions of 0.01953376, worth approximately $930.99.

While the scammers have only earned ~$3,661 from these two addresses, many other bitcoin addresses are likely used in this scam.

Even worse, while writing this article, the second bitcoin address received three more "donations." showing that this scam continues to be successful.

As these scams have the potential to generate a large amount of money for threat actors, they are not going away any time soon and will likely continue to spread to other messaging platforms.

Therefore, everyone needs to recognize that almost every crypto giveaway site is a scam, especially those that pretend to be from Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, and Gemini.

If you receive emails, tweets, or other messages on social media promoting these types of giveaways, it is safer to realize that cryptocurrency you send will not produce anything in return.