Yet Another ‘Verified’ Fake Elon Musk Page Pops Up On Facebook With Cryptocurrency Scam

Less than a month after a “Facebook verified” page of Elon Musk was discovered to be fake and taken down, yet another verified fake page has popped up on the Meta-owned social networking site.

The page is under the Tesla CEO’s name and, much like last time, appears to be running a cryptocurrency scam. The fake page was red-flagged by a 25–year-old security researcher, Ehraz Ahmed, who was responsible for busting the earlier scam as well.

Ahmed told online news portal Web News Observer that he suspects the new page is being operated by the same scammers as before. The current page has over 70,000 followers, but a sub-par rating of 3.6 stars.

“By visiting the Page Transparency section, I noticed that this page, unlike the previous ones, was created back in May 2015. The location of the admins is, once again, Germany and Spain, which may mean that these scammers are the same people who were behind the previous similar scams,” Ahmed was quoted as saying by Web News Observer.

The latest post on the fake page reads, “To participate in my new coin, #MUSKcoin. which will cause a sensation in the coming period, message me.”

At the time of this writing, the post was liked 832 times, shared 39 times and had 372 comments.

The Page Transparency section shows that the name of this page hasn’t changed at all since it was set up on May 6, 2015. “It was created by the name of Elon Musk and must have been verified with his name only. However, a point of concern is the fact that the scammers might have used the fake documents of Musk to get this page verified,” Ahmed was quoted as saying by the online news portal.

The Page Transparency section

Ahmed added that it is still unclear as to what the scammers have in mind this time, but that is is “obvious is that it is yet another Cryptocurrency scam”.

The page appears to have become active only after the previous page was taken down, on November 26 this year. It has about 20  posts, all of which appear to be quite similar to Musk’s posts on Twitter.

People appear to have wised up to the scam, however going by the page reviews, which clearly call the page out for being fake.

“This is true that people are becoming aware of such scams, however, there’s still a long way to go. While many are smart enough to give a fraud alert in the page recommendation section, there are still a lot of people who are all excited to know more about this so-called new coin,” Ahmed was quoted as saying by Web News Observer.

The back-to-back verified fake pages highlight a serious gap in the way Facebook goes about the process, something the social media giant should look at.

(Edited by : Vijay Anand)