In recent days, a crypto scam using a verified SpaceX profile and a deepfake of Elon Musk was promoted on YouTube.
Although there are almost scams every day, in this specific case there were at least two peculiar elements that made it particularly difficult to recognize as such.
Summary
SpaceX: the crypto scam with a deepfake of Elon Musk
The first convincing element was the fact that a verified YouTube channel called SpaceX was being used, complete with an identical logo to the official one.
Since the scam was promoted during a live stream dedicated to the solar eclipse the day before yesterday, the scammers must have organized everything well in advance.
They managed to take possession of a verified YouTube channel with over 300,000 subscribers, and changed its name and logo using those of SpaceX.
SpaceX is the company owned by Elon Musk that deals with space travel, so to a less attentive eye that direct connection could seem absolutely legitimate.
It was easy to suspect that it was not actually the SpaceX YouTube channel, given the number of subscribers. In fact, the company’s real channel has many more subscribers, over six and a half million, which is twenty times more than the channel that was pretending to be it.
Unfortunately, these are details that escape the eyes of the less attentive, and are not easy to identify because not everyone is able to understand that a channel like this cannot have only 300,000 subscribers.
It is worth noting that SpaceX reportedly invested in Bitcoin a few years ago, so the company not only deals with space, and therefore with the eclipse, but also with the crypto markets.
Elon Musk
As if that wasn’t enough, the live stream at one point showed a deepfake of Elon Musk asking users to scan a QR code on the screen to send cryptocurrencies to an address.
The fake Musk promised to double the capital “invested” by users in this way.
Obviously none of this was true, as always when someone promises to double the capital in a short time without doing anything.
The scammers’ only goal was to convince the naive to send their crypto to the address promoted by the deepfake of Elon Musk: the scam ended there.
The deepfake of Musk was a virtual character created with artificial intelligence resembling the founder of SpaceX, CEO of Tesla, and owner of X.
Even Elon Musk in the past has dealt with the crypto markets, so to a careless and naive eye, it could seem credible that he was inviting to make “investments” in cryptocurrencies.
In reality, there was no investment at all, but only a trivial attempt to convince people to give their crypto to skilled scammers.
The success of the scam
The incriminated video is no longer available on YouTube, but those who have seen it and scanned the QR code report that it pointed to the website nasa-eclipse.com.
Obviously it was not a website connected to NASA, but a domain registered in Russia.
Indeed, at this moment it appears to be obscured, with a message in Russian saying that the website hosting has been temporarily suspended.
The problem is that those who watched the live stream reported that at one point there were more than 200,000 people connected, so it is conceivable that several thousand scanned the QR code promoted by the fake Musk and went to the scam website nasa-eclipse.com.
Furthermore, there appear to be at least two other verified YouTube channels with the name and logo of SpaceX that have broadcasted that live stream, and perhaps there were others as well.
Actually, paradoxically at this moment it seems that the live broadcast is still being transmitted by another channel:
This livestream has a QR code that points to another fraudulent website, eclipse-spacex.com, still online.
Unfortunately, scammers have used other crypto addresses, and those listed on the new website have not yet received any funds.
Since it is no longer possible to know which addresses they had used on nasa-eclipse.com, it is also not possible to verify how many cryptocurrencies have been sent to the scammers.
