Bitdefender Labs warn of Bitcoin fraud campaigns on behalf of Elon Musk and Tesla. Cyber scammers are taking advantage of the increased interest in cryptocurrencies.
Cyber criminals are always very creative. The experts at Bitdefender Labs have now come across a particularly brazen scam. On behalf of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and under the pretext of giving away Bitcoins (BTC), tens of thousands of fraudulent emails were sent to Internet users as part of two campaigns. The first campaign is largely based on German IP addresses.
Scam 1: Elon Musk gives you Bitcoin worth $ 5.000.
In the first campaign, which started on May 15th, emails were sent with a PDF attachment. Interestingly, the senders do not use a malicious payload for PDF, only provide supposedly serious information, camouflage themselves from the security defense and apparently only speculate on the money. The content is an alleged raffle by the Tesla Marketing department. Bitcoins worth 5.000 US dollars await the win. To bypass spam filters, cyber criminals use different subject lines such as “you are the best today read the file”, “Examine the attachment” or “More about the offer in the file”.
80 percent of the spam comes from Germany!
They also give the PDF attachments different names. In the appendix, the users were informed that if a small amount of Bitcoin was paid in as an ICO (Initital Coin Offering), a larger sum than Airdrop would later be paid out to them. However, only while the BTC supply lasts. If you come too late, so the promise, your deposited bitcoins will be refunded immediately. Which is probably not the case.
According to Bitdefender Labs, 79,72% of fraudulent emails were sent from IP addresses in Germany. 11% of emails were addressed to users in the UK, 79,26% in Sweden and 9,22% in the US.
Scam 2: Tesla buys BTC for $ 1,5 billion
In a second scam campaign uncovered by Bitdefender Labs, spammers are even more creative. The criminals used Tesla's purchase of Bitcoins worth 1,5 billion US dollars in February this year as a hook and lured the recipients with a promotional email. This informs that the carmaker is planning to give half of it away.
Anyone who wants to receive some of the money need do nothing more than send a Bitcoin amount between 0,1 BTC and 50 BTC to a certain address, which would be refunded twice immediately after receipt of the transaction. All participants must also scan a QR code with an alleged Bitcoin address. The perpetrators use several crypto wallets for their fraud. One of them is currently showing 31 transactions with a total value of $ 1.965,21.
Someone always falls for it
With the second fraud campaign, the fraudsters have so far reached over 30.000 users worldwide. 16,73% of spam emails come from IP addresses in Brazil, 14,15% in Russia, 6,32% in Indonesia, 4,91% in Turkey, 4,56% in Ukraine, 4,44, 3,68% in Spain, 3,63% in the USA, 2,16% in Italy, 2,11% in India, 1,93% in Romania and XNUMX% in the Netherlands.
Since cryptocurrencies have been booming, more and more cyber criminals have tried to make a profit from them. Celebrities, popular figureheads like Elon Musk are particularly good at pulling money out of the pockets of people with false promises. So skepticism is appropriate. If you don't want to become a victim of crypto fraudsters, you should always check with the respective company before making a payment.
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About Bitdefender Bitdefender is a leading global provider of cybersecurity solutions and antivirus software, protecting over 500 million systems in more than 150 countries. Since it was founded in 2001, the company's innovations have consistently ensured excellent security products and intelligent protection for devices, networks and cloud services for private customers and companies. As the supplier of choice, Bitdefender technology is found in 38 percent of security solutions deployed around the world and is trusted and recognized by industry experts, manufacturers and customers alike. www.bitdefender.de