Twitter scammers are jumping on Elon Musk’s hosting of Saturday Night Live to push cryptocurrency scams to steal people’s Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin.
For the past year, we have been reporting how scammers have been raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars by promoting fake giveaway scams from well-known people or companies, such as Elon Musk, Tesla, and Gemini Exchange.
A more recent tactic has been to hack abandoned verified Twitter accounts to promote these scams to a larger base of followers.
These tactics have been immensely successful for the scammers as they have stolen cryptocurrency worth over a million dollars from unsuspecting users.
Using SNL as part of their scam
With Elon Musk hosting tonight’s Saturday Night Live episode, the Twitter scammers have been hacking into verified Twitter accounts and changing their profiles to impersonate SNL.
The scammers use these hacked accounts to reply to tweets by Elon Musk where they pretend to be SNL promoting a cryptocurrency giveaway scam.
When visiting these links, users will find themselves at a fake Medium post pretending to be a 5,000 BTC giveaway by Elon Musk.
These posts contain further links to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin giveaway pages where people can allegedly receive ten times the amount they send to a particular cryptocurrency address, as shown below.
People continue to fall for these scams
While you may be wondering how anyone could fall for these scams, unfortunately, these fake giveaways have been highly successful for the scammers.
MalwareHunterTeam, who has been monitoring these scams, has told BleepingComputer that this SNL scam has been heavily pushed today with a constant stream of verified accounts promoting the giveaway URLs.
From the list of example tweets shared with BleepingComputer, we have determined that the scammers have made at least $97,054.62 over the past two days.
These earnings include 0.69515729 bitcoins, with at today’s high prices is equal to $40,840.
Bitcoin address Amount USD amount 1FEby7AkA6mup1UMFejU75CeAweoZ87yUd 0.04901072 $2,879 1H2U97kRxzYLH68Zqh6FZQu8uEw7YuVP84 0.64614657 $37,961
The Ethereum giveaway scams also earned them $13,758..
Ethereum address Amount USD amount 0xdCb048505a78DC727D5213f2bd7eECB095f928E5 0.265400570000000000 $1,029 0x902501E5655f1b0747dE4fcE892efcf65eb17c2D 3.281818386000000000 $12,729
Finally, Dogecoin, the newcomer in cryptocurrency giveaways and a favorite of Musk, received over 66,000 Dogecoin worth $42,456.
Dogecoin address Amount USD amount DTqWA5kiMQG38S8MFt3SvokrR9w7VPubDZ 6,034.52499326 $3,862 DHBzBvSPc51Qpkp2XjtZJNY1mr4MzPkY2S 60,303.37919953 $38,594
BleepingComputer gathered these cryptocurrency addresses from just two different scam sites, and as the scammers utilize numerous giveaway sites, the scammers likely made much more this week.
It is important to remember that nobody is giving away their cryptocurrency for free, especially when they have become so valuable.
If you see a giveaway scam on Twitter, especially one allegedly promoted by Musk, it is better to treat it as a scam rather than lose anything you send them.
