Have there ever been more buzzwords stuffed into a single headline? It appears that An AI-generated Elon Musk was running a scam where it shilled crypto. As much as we want to believe that this is clickbait, it’s not.
Suffice it to say, Elon himself wasn’t involved in this scam. We’re still waiting for information about who was running the scam. So, you’re going to have to stay tuned for more information on this topic.
An AI-generated Elon Musk was shilling crypto
We should know how these sorts of scams work by now. A YouTube livestream started, and it starred Mr. Elon Musk; only, it wasn’t him. It was an AI-generated voice masquerading as him. Scammers use this tactic all of the time. They emulate notable figures to push their crypto scams.
Emulating notable figures like Elon Musk, Mr. Beast, MKBHD, etc. is a surefire way to get unsuspecting users to believe in them. In fact, there was a case a few years ago where Arun Maini (AKA Mr. Whostheboss) had his account hacked and used to shill Crypto.
This latest scam wasn’t any different. The account that live-streamed was named @elon.teslastream. It’s been taken down, but it peaked at 10.7K subscribers. That should be the first clue that something was up. The official Tesla YouTube channel sports 2.65 million subscribers.
It was asking for users to invest their Bitcoin, Ethereum, or Dogecoin to participate in a giveaway. The scam was promising to “automatically send back double the amount of the cryptocurrency [people] deposited.” Yes, you have permission to roll your eyes.
While this was obviously a scam, there were, apparently, upwards of 30,000 viewers in the stream. We’re not sure how many of those were bots and how many were actual human idiots.
These scams aren’t only being presented on YouTube. We’ve seen other reports of this sort of thing happening on Reddit and other platforms. We’re not sure how these platforms plan to combat this, but we know that it’s only going to get worse as time goes on.
