File photo of Elon Musk on April 7, 2022 at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colo. ... [+]
Have you noticed a deluge of advertisements on Twitter lately touting scam cryptocurrencies that use Elon Musk’s face? You’re not alone. Last week, I reported on the paid ads that fraudulently use Musk and his companies to shill garbage crypto. And it seems the problem is only getting worse.
“Neura makes public their Blockchain Project,” an ad I spotted on Sunday reads.
If you click on the ad it takes you to a page that says promises, “Breaking news for all crypto investors around the world!”
The page insists that a “pre-sale” is underway for a Neuralink-branded cryptocurrency, something that’s simply not true. Well, the token sale is real—in the sense that scammers are trying to get your money.
“The visionary CEO of Tesla and Neuralink, Elon Musk, has just announced the launch of the official Neuralink Token, and the Pre-Sale is now open for a limited time only,” the scam page reads.
In reality, Elon Musk has never launched his own cryptocurrency. And he’s never endorsed a coin tied to Tesla, Neuralink, or SpaceX, or any of his other companies. If you buy the coin, which is billed as going for $2.50 each, you’re simply handing your money to scammers.
Scam ad promoting a new Neuralink cryptocurrency token with a non-existent affiliation with Elon ... [+]
Twitter, which used to promptly respond to inquiries by journalists before Musk took over, has still not responded to my questions. And it’s still unclear whether Twitter is fully aware that scammers are using the platform to sell scam crypto. But whether they’re aware or not, the company is clearly making money by taking ad dollars from scammers.
Clicking through the ad I saw on Sunday, users eventually arrive at a website made to look like an official Neuralink site. And it’s this shell game that probably allows the scammers to get their ads approved. Presumably, the content being linked to looks innocuous enough when it’s reviewed by Twitter’s processes—assuming they still have some kind of ad review processes—and then the content at those links is switched out once the ad is live.
One of the scam websites shilling crypto that's made to look like Neuralink's website.
The ad I saw on Sunday wasn’t the only crypto scam in recent days. I also saw a SpaceX-themed coin being advertised on Twitter and sold using the same techniques. The ad used a photo of Musk with a SpaceX logo behind his head, and was made to look like it was coming from CoinTelegraph, an actual news outlet that covers crypto.
And just like the scams I reported on last week, the scammers are promising that people who buy enough could win free investment advice from Musk via WhatsApp, a trip to Mars, or a free brain chip implant from Neuralink. The only real difference between the site now and the one I saw a week ago is that the deepfake video of Musk appears to be gone.
Given recent news that the FDA has rejected Neuralink’s application for human trials, you’d think the scammers would want to update that promise. But maybe the scam artists are banking on the fact that whoever would fall for this kind of scam isn’t keeping the best tabs on the news. After all, they’re promising a new cryptocurrency that Musk has never promoted on his official Twitter account.
I reached out to Twitter yet again on Sunday and will update this post if I hear back. But I’m not going to hold my breath.
