Twitter scammers impersonate SNL in Elon Musk cryptocurrency scams

Twitter scammers are jumping on Elon Musk's hosting of Saturday Night Live to push cryptocurrency scams to steal people's Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin.

For the past year, we have been reporting how scammers have been raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars by promoting fake giveaway scams from well-known people or companies, such as Elon Musk, Tesla, and Gemini Exchange.

A more recent tactic has been to hack abandoned verified Twitter accounts to promote these scams to a larger base of followers.

These tactics have been immensely successful for the scammers as they have stolen cryptocurrency worth over a million dollars from unsuspecting users.

Using SNL as part of their scam

With Elon Musk hosting tonight's Saturday Night Live episode, the Twitter scammers have been hacking into verified Twitter accounts and changing their profiles to impersonate SNL.

Hacked site impersonating SNL

The scammers use these hacked accounts to reply to tweets by Elon Musk where they pretend to be SNL promoting a cryptocurrency giveaway scam.

A tweet promoting a fake Elon Musk giveaway

When visiting these links, users will find themselves at a fake Medium post pretending to be a 5,000 BTC giveaway by Elon Musk. 

Fake Tesla cryptocurrency giveaway site

These posts contain further links to Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin giveaway pages where people can allegedly receive ten times the amount they send to a particular cryptocurrency address, as shown below.

Fake Tesla Bitcoin giveaway page

People continue to fall for these scams

While you may be wondering how anyone could fall for these scams, unfortunately, these fake giveaways have been highly successful for the scammers.

MalwareHunterTeam, who has been monitoring these scams, has told BleepingComputer that this SNL scam has been heavily pushed today with a constant stream of verified accounts promoting the giveaway URLs.

From the list of example tweets shared with BleepingComputer, we have determined that the scammers have made at least $97,054.62 over the past two days.

These earnings include 0.69515729 bitcoins, with at today's high prices is equal to $40,840.

The Ethereum giveaway scams also earned them $13,758..

Finally, Dogecoin, the newcomer in cryptocurrency giveaways and a favorite of Musk, received over 66,000 Dogecoin worth $42,456.

BleepingComputer gathered these cryptocurrency addresses from just two different scam sites, and as the scammers utilize numerous giveaway sites, the scammers likely made much more this week.

It is important to remember that nobody is giving away their cryptocurrency for free, especially when they have become so valuable.

If you see a giveaway scam on Twitter, especially one allegedly promoted by Musk, it is better to treat it as a scam rather than lose anything you send them.