Elon Musk deep fakes promote new cryptocurrency scam

Cryptocurrency scammers are using deep fake videos of Elon Musk and other prominent cryptocurrency advocates to promote a BitVex trading platform scam that steals deposited currency.

This fake BitVex cryptocurrency trading platform claims to be owned by Elon Musk, who created the site to allow everyone to earn up to 30% returns on their crypto deposits.

This scam campaign started earlier this month with threat actors creating or hacking existing YouTube accounts to host deep fake videos of Elon Musk, Cathie Wood, Brad Garlinghouse, Michael Saylor, and Charles Hoskinson.

These videos are legitimate interviews modified with deep fake technology to use the person’s voice in a script provided by the threat actors.

An example of one of the scam videos can be seen below, where Elon promotes the new scam site and says he invested $50 million into the platform.

However, if you look carefully, you will see that the deep fake synchronizes the person’s talking to the threat actor’s script, which is so silly as to be comical.

How do we know this is a scam?

While it is obvious that the interviews have been altered to simulate Elon Musk’s voice to promote the BitVex trading platform, numerous other clues show that this is a scam.

Many YouTube channels promoting this trading platform have been hacked to suddenly show YouTube videos or YouTube Shorts that promote the BitVex trading site.

For example, a YouTube channel that displayed gaming videos in Arabic suddenly began showing a series of YouTube Shorts that promoted the BitVex scam. In addition, BleepingComputer has found dozens of other YouTube channels hijacked similarly to promote this scam.

Once you visit the BitVex trading site itself, it becomes more apparent that this is a scam.

For example, the site claims that Elon Musk is the CEO of the trading platform and contains endorsements from Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood and Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao.

To use the BitVex platform, users must register an account at bitvex[.]org or bitvex[.]net to access the investment platform.

Once you log in, the…