The “Elon Musk Mutual Aid Fund” or “Elon Musk Club,” a new Elon Musk-themed bitcoin giveaway fraud that began a few weeks ago, is being marketed through spam email campaigns.
Before you dismiss these frauds by claiming that no one falls for them, keep in mind that comparable crypto schemes have previously been highly successful, generating hundreds of thousands of dollars.
For example, in 2018, scammers made $180K in a single day, in January 2021, Twitter faced a large attack in which crypto scammers made $580K in a week, and in February, another scam stole $145K.
Someone recently paid three bitcoins ($150,074 at the time) to a well-known cryptocurrency giveaway scam.
The Elon Musk Club scam
Scammers are now using email spam to sell a new “Elon Musk Club” or “Elon Musk Mutual Aid Fund” giveaway. While most cryptocurrency scams target social media users, scammers are now using email spam to promote a new “Elon Musk Club” or “Elon Musk Mutual Aid Fund” giveaway.
The phishing emails themselves are simple, with bizarre non-descriptive subject lines and text. They do, however, include an HTML attachment titled “Get Free Bitcoin – [id].htm” or “Elon Musk Club – [id].htm,” as seen below.
A single line of code in these HTML attachments utilizes JavaScript to redirect the browser to the https://msto.me/elonmusk/ webpage.
The site https://msto.me/elonmusk/ will pose as an “Elon Musk – Mutual Aid Fund,” promising to send 0.001 to 0.055 bitcoins to all participants.
When you click the “Accept an invitation” button, the site will redirect you to https://bitcoindonateur.com/, which simply means “Bitcoin Donate.”
To receive the free bitcoin, you must provide a bitcoin address, your name, and an optional image at this site.
When you click the ‘Accept contribute’ button, you’ll be redirected to a series of pages posing as users donating.001 bitcoin to your account.
After your account has accumulated 0.055 false bitcoin donations, you will be sent to a website indicating that in order to receive your “financial aid,” you must first donate 0.001 bitcoins to another user.
Scammers, on the other hand, possess these bitcoin addresses and receive your “contribution” but do not send anything in return.
Two bitcoin addresses have been linked to these schemes so far, according to a digital cybersecurity publication:
- 73 transactions of 0.05734407 bitcoins were received, on 32hU2JrkmMmgmka2rUuKXc3yd3S9WKxWnp, totaling $2,731.98.
- Also received 23 transactions worth $930.99 in the amount of 0.01953376 on 3EbUB9wdQCxJwW5neH3xnTGjuoCA8THU5D.
While the scammers have only made $3,661 from these two bitcoin addresses, many more are likely to be utilized in the future.
Worse, the second bitcoin account received three more “donations” while this article was being written, indicating that the fraud is still working.
Because these frauds have the potential to make a lot of money for threat actors, they aren’t going away anytime soon and will most likely extend to other messaging platforms as well.
As a result, everyone should be aware that practically every cryptocurrency giveaway site is a hoax, particularly those posing as Elon Musk, Tesla, SpaceX, or Gemini.
If you receive emails, tweets, or other social media messages promoting these types of giveaways, it’s best to assume that any cryptocurrency you provide will be useless.
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