Elon Musk's videos, created using artificial intelligence, are flooding YouTube, showing fake images of the solar eclipse to promote crypto scams.
Yesterday, April 8, 2024, the world had turned all its attention to the prevailing solar eclipse. This particular phenomenon still dominates news articles, floods social media, and becomes a viral spread through impressive photos and videos across the entire internet.
Go to YouTube, and you will find that the live streaming broadcasts of the solar eclipse gather hundreds of thousands of concurrent viewers. However, some of the most popular live streaming broadcasts may not be exactly what they seem.
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YouTube is flooded with deceptive live streaming broadcasts from SpaceX scam channels featuring a fake Elon Musk speech created with the help of artificial intelligence. The pattern behind these scam broadcasts? To extort cryptocurrency from unsuspecting users.
How does the crypto scam (Musk eclipse) work?
Each broadcast follows the same pattern: a recorded video of Elon Musk plays repeatedly next to a SpaceX logo, where he appears to be speaking in front of an audience. However, the video uses an AI-generated voice of Musk, who tells viewers about a fantastic cryptocurrency, promising to double their investment.
Above the video, there is a QR code embedded with the inscription “Eclipse of 2024 – Change your life” and an invitation for viewers to scan it. This code refers them to a website, where they have the option to “invest” their cryptocurrencies, be it Bitcoin, Ether, or any other popular cryptocurrency, directly through the website.
From time to time, these live streams even feature a virtual Elon Musk account posting in the live chat, offering updates to the audience about the hypothetical investments being proposed. The “fake” Musk posts links in the chat, directing users to platforms where they allegedly can invest.
"2024 Total Solar Eclipse: From the SpaceX Viewpoint" is the title of a purported SpaceX live broadcast, which at one point managed to gather more than 210,000 simultaneous viewers.
«Live: Solar Eclipse Spectacular 2024 of SpaceX» is the title of another streaming broadcast, which attracted tens of thousands of views. At one point, this live streaming broadcast recorded almost 100,000 concurrent views.
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Many of these broadcasts last for many hours and are broadcast on YouTube channels with hundreds of thousands of subscribers.
Misleading videos about SpaceX and Elon Musk are nothing new on YouTube. The prevalence of these videos suggests that they are a lucrative medium for their creators, despite their deceptive nature.
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A few years ago, Steve Wozniak filed a lawsuit against YouTube, accusing the platform of widely distributing videos containing fake appearances of the Apple, with the aim of promoting Bitcoin-related scams.
Source: mashable
