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Fake Elon Musk live streams promoting crypto scams continue to appear on YouTube
Is there any end in sight to Elon Musk’s fake YouTube livestream scams?
During the weekend, Dedicate onself reported a YouTube broadcast featuring Elon Musk speaking at what appears to be a Tesla conference-type event. According to Engadget, the live stream had over 30,000 viewers at one point.
One problem: It wasn’t real. The fake live event is part of an ongoing cryptocurrency scam on YouTube.
Fake Elon Musk live streams on YouTube continue to thrive
Scammers taking part in this particular scheme appear to focus exclusively on YouTube to perpetrate their fraudulent activity.
The idea behind it is simple. Scammers broadcast a video of Elon Musk speaking at a live streaming event. Often, these broadcasts feature actual videos of Musk on a loop. The audio can be a fake AI-generated voice that sounds like Musk or actual audio of a Musk speech that is generic enough to be almost anything.
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The on-screen graphics, however, portray the event as a live speech by Musk on cryptocurrency. These often include links or QR codes to the crypto scam, urging viewers to take this opportunity before the live stream ends.
There is another crucial element to this scam. These live videos are often streamed on hijacked YouTube channels that people are already subscribed to. These compromised channels can have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, so there is a built-in audience that YouTube alerts you to because a channel that these users are subscribed to has just gone “live.” The scammer usually changes the name of the YouTube channel to make it appear as an official account related to Musk or Tesla.
In this particular case, over the weekend, the hacked channel had more than 10,000 subscribers and was also verified by YouTube. The channel has been renamed “Tesla” with the YouTube handle “@elon.teslastream”.
While Engadget at one point displayed the live stream with up to 30,000 concurrent live viewers, it’s unclear how many of those were real people. YouTube often promotes and recommends live streams based on the number of users who are currently watching the stream. It’s possible that some of that audience was made up of bots to trick YouTube’s algorithm and push the video into users’ feeds.
Although Musk and Tesla are most commonly used to promote these crypto scams in live streams on YouTube, the scammers have changed their strategy a bit at times. For example, in April, Mashable reported about a SpaceX version of this scam that used the solar eclipse as a weapon to perpetuate their crypto scheme on YouTube.
Nearly four years ago, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak actually sued YouTube on live streams of Bitcoin scams using his likeness. So, this has clearly been going on for quite a while now. And, unfortunately, it looks like these fake YouTube live streaming programs will continue, at least for the foreseeable future.