TL;DR Breakdown
- Scam Elona Musk tokens named after Elon Musk flood the crypto market.
- Rugpull crypto scams are on the rise.
- A rising need for crypto investors to exercise caution during financial trades.
Elon Musk is the world’s wealthiest person. His businesses have had significant impacts on the global economy. When investors hear the term “crypto,” Elon Musk, aka the DogeFather, is the most popular person that springs to mind. In the last 24 hours, con artists have taken advantage of the billionaire’s influence on the market. They have created multiple female versions of the business magnate’s persona by setting up 16 honeypots.
Elona Musk scam tokens
PeckShield released a warning through Twitter after the crypto space became flooded with Elona Musk coins tied to the arrival of a female version of the Tesla CEO. An unknown user on Twitter initially posted an image of Elona Musk, which caught Maye Musk’s (Elon’s mother) attention.
#PeckShieldAlert #Elona #Honeypot PeckShield has detected ~32 $Elona were created between March 15 and 16 on #Ethereum.
— PeckShieldAlert (@PeckShieldAlert) March 17, 2022
15 out of 32 of these $Elona appear to be #honeypot. @elonmusk Do *NOT* fall prey to it.#ELONASHIBA #ELONAKONG #PRETTYELONA #SEXYELONA #ELONADOG #ELONvPUTIN pic.twitter.com/qphSrkgeRx
Over 30 tokens appeared on various networks after renaming the account to Elona Musk. The scammers utilized the growing popularity of the meme to establish smart contracts with several backdoors. Their strategy is to generate traction to maximize sales of the scammy tokens without getting found out. These backdoors will allow the developers to remove funds from users’ wallets or use them in other ways.
PeckShield informed Elon Musk of the con artists’ activities in the crypto sector, warning him of the Trojan horse that would inevitably come his way. Scammers also utilized other popular cryptocurrencies and tokens in the names of their smart contracts: ELONASHIBA, ELONANFT, and ELONADOGE.
The recent crypto fraud targeting Elon Musk is no surprise to the cryptocurrency community. Such trends have been used to set up scams in the past and will persist in the future. It is just the continuation of the trend where scammers clone popular tokens to perpetrate fraudulent activities, as they most recently did with Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk.
The most popular technique to steal investor funds is a rugpull: distributing (selling) coins or tokens to users, which promotes the market value of an asset. Then they sell the pre-mine or funds deposited in a developer’s reserve wallet to dump the market.
Crypto scams on the rise
In detail, the Elona Musk deployer minted 1 trillion $Elona tokens. Then the deployer burned 500 billion tokens before adding another 500 billion as liquidity, along with 196.5 BNB. After that, the deployer removed all the liquidity and carted approximately 259,891,540,144.73 Elona Musk and 379.38 BNB. The deployer then sent the entire BNB loot (382.83) to different addresses. Tornado Cash received numerous transactions from the same address to transfer BNB in multiple stages over some time.
The cryptocurrency market is already highly volatile, and participation has associated risks. However, any type of cryptocurrency fraud may be traumatic to victims and result in significant losses. Many unlawful cryptocurrency investments took place last year, paving the way to greater fraud incidents.
The WAX Dynasty research firm recently published a study focusing on cryptocurrency scams. According to the report, cybercriminals have grown so powerful that they can hack into well-known DeFi platforms and sell fraudulent tokens for cash.
By far, crypto scams are the most severe threat to cryptocurrency investors. Chinese authorities recently arrested eight individuals and froze nearly 6 million Yuan ($946,000) of digital assets linked to a crypto fraud earlier this year as part of Beijing’s efforts to combat cryptocurrencies.
