TL;DR Breakdown
- Michael Saylor impersonated to run giveaway scam.
- Saylor says he has reported over 500 fake addresses but they keep coming up.
Chief Executive Officer of Business intelligence firm MicroStrategy’ Michael Saylor has been impersonated to run a fake crypto giveaway scam. They garnered over $1m in Bitcoin with the operation.
The scam comes in the wake of many others that have become a threat to the crypto industry. Perpetrators pretend to be a famous person from the community and offer to double all BTC that users send to their wallets.
Afterward, all BTC that is transferred to the scammers’ addresses are lost, and the victim does not receive anything in return.
As funny and cheap as giveaway scams sound, people continue to fall victim quite frequently in the hope of getting free money.
Michael Saylor, wary of imposters, reveals he keeps reporting them
Michael Saylor, whose company owns the most BTC and a personal HODLer himself, is frequently impersonated. His impersonation was revealed during the weekend as Whale Alert reported one address confirmed to be a Saylor-impersonating scam.
Although it has been active for less than a month (January only), the wallet has attracted more than $1.1 million worth of bitcoin, reflecting how dangerous the scam could be.
Saylor himself eventually commented on Whale Alert’s post later on, indicating that nearly 500 such scams went live on YouTube in just one week.
He said his team continues to report them “every 15 minutes, and they are taken down after a few hours,” but they continue to pop up frequently.
Cryptocurrency giveaway scams have been a problem for those involved in the crypto-community since the last major bull run in late 2017.
Giveaway scams are a form of social engineering in which a scammer attempts to deceive a cryptocurrency investor into believing that a major cryptocurrency exchange or celebrity is hosting a giveaway. The catch here is that in order to participate in the giveaway, you must first send a certain amount of cryptocurrency to a giveaway address so that you can verify your wallet address and receive your share of the giveaway.
