One Bitcoin user paid 3 BTC, or $179,000, to a confirmed giveaway scam impersonating MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor.
Fake Michael Saylor Giveaway costs Bitcoin user $179,000
It said the theft occurred via the website mstrategy.io/bit, a “confirmed” scam platform used by con artists to impersonate Saylor. Scammers often pose like a celebrity, in this case, Saylor, before asking users to send bitcoins to a specified address. They promise to multiply the cryptocurrencies that investors deposit – giveaways – but instead, they will make a profit with the money.
Source: Whale Alert
This time, a BTC user lost $179,000 to the scammers. At the time of writing, the primary Bitcoin address in question has received a total of over $4.16 million, or 72.14 BTC, from 49 transactions. The current value of the address is $590,000 or 16.7 BTC.
Saylor, CEO of MicroStrategy, is a big proponent of cryptocurrency. Since last August, MicroStrategy has bought up to 114,042 BTC – the largest holding of any publicly-traded company. The holdings are worth more than $6.57 billion at current market prices.
Scammers don’t just pretend to be Saylor. They also impersonate Tesla CEO Elon Musk as well as government agencies or famous businesses. In Musk’s case, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) reported that online criminals stole more than $2 million in fake gifts linked to the influential billionaire between 6 months to May 2021.
Cryptocurrency fraud has increased dramatically in recent years. The industry seems to have fallen victim to its success, as incidents of fraud tend to be associated with exponential growth in digital asset prices.
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