A YouTube Dwell broadcast working for 5 hours at this time used a deepfake of Elon Musk to advertise a cryptocurrency rip-off, marking the most recent in a sequence of comparable fraudulent streams. The video, now taken down, featured an AI-generated Musk showing to livestream from a Tesla occasion. The deepfake Musk, with an AI-generated voice, directed viewers to go to an internet site and deposit bitcoin, Ethereum, or Dogecoin to take part in a giveaway, promising to “robotically ship again double the quantity of the cryptocurrency you deposited.”
The stream attracted over 30,000 viewers at its peak, although these numbers might have been inflated by bots, pushing it to the highest of YouTube’s Dwell Now suggestions. The fraudulent account, @elon.teslastream, had the Official Artist Channel verification badge, suggesting a potential account hack. After Engadget reached out to Google, each the video and the channel have been eliminated. Additional updates from Google are awaited.
Scammers have just lately elevated the variety of deepfake scams that includes Elon Musk, with scammers continuously utilizing accounts impersonating Musk’s firms. This specific stream was titled “Tesla’s [sic] unveils a masterpiece: The Tesla that can change the automobile trade endlessly.” Earlier in June, Cointelegraph reported on comparable scams involving 35 accounts pretending to be SpaceX across the launch of the Starship. In April, scammers exploited eclipse hype utilizing the identical tactic, as reported by Mashable.
Cryptocurrency scams focusing on Musk’s followers on social media have been an ongoing challenge, together with scams involving different celebrities. Lately, 50 Cent’s accounts have been hacked to hold out a pump-and-dump scheme. The persistence and evolution of those scams underscore the challenges in defending customers from refined on-line frauds, significantly these leveraging AI and deepfake expertise.