Scammers are once again capitalizing on the popularity of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, with fake tokens again emerging as part of potential phishing attacks.
A wallet linked to former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao received 90 million fake Grok (GROK) tokens on April 21, according to blockchain security firm PeckShield.
The tokens are “likely a scam,” since the “deployer distributed it to multiple addresses via multisend,” PeckShield said.
The X platform’s Grok AI chatbot has no official cryptocurrency and no plans to launch one in the future.
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Fake Grok-related tokens first emerged in 2023 when a scammer deployed an ERC-20 Grok token on Ethereum, which led to an over 90% drop after the deployer sold 0.5% of the total supply, according to blockchain data visualization platform, Bubblemaps.
Scammers often capitalize on the credibility of social media platforms, large brands, or celebrities like Elon Musk to cultivate a sense of trust with victims.
Meta was the most mimicked brand in phishing reports filed throughout 2024, according to a report by email security provider Mailsuite.
Coinbase was the most impersonated brand by scammers in the crypto industry, but Meta was targeted by over 25 times as many scammers as the cryptocurrency exchange.
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Elon Musk-related scams and fake coins see a resurgence
Elon Musk-related scams and fake tokens are seeing a resurgence as scammers continue vying for investors’ crypto holdings.
A fake announcement claiming to be an official “AI Elon Musk stream” giving away $20,000 worth of cryptocurrency was flagged on April 14 by crypto recovery and security advocate, Denis Thomas.
Multiple other Elon Musk-related memecoins were launched on the BNB Smart Chain in recent weeks, according to a scam detector platform, Coinspeedrun.
Phishing scams like address poisoning involve tricking victims into sending assets to fraudulent wallet addresses.
Phishing scams cost the crypto industry over $1 billion across 296 incidents in 2024, making them a major threat, according to blockchain security firm CertiK.
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