Staggering Elon Musk Twitter Poll Causes Doge to Skyrocket; But Group of Hackers Impersonate Billionaire to Steal Cryptos

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Billionaire, Elon Musk, has launched a survey, through his account on social media platform, Twitter, with the question: “Do you want Tesla to accept Doge?” with a landmark response from 3 million users.

Doge refers to Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency that Musk has toyed with in recent months. Hours after the poll, its price skyrocketed to the detriment of other similar currencies such as Bitcoin or Ethereum, which paid with drops for the umpteenth time following an Elon Musk-fueled frenzy.

The survey arises days after he called dogecoin a ‘hustle’, which sent the price of the meme-inspired cryptocurrency reeling after a month-long 700% rally. An advocate of digital currencies, Musk made the comment as a guest host on the sketch comedy television show, Saturday Night Live, last weekend.

Dogecoin, in any case is not a common cryptocurrency, but represents a typical example of the fever surrounding these type of assets, since it started its journey as an Internet meme. Specifically, its creators were inspired by viral jokes made with a dog (Shiba Inu breed) to which dialogues with comic themes were added.

The unusual interest in this volatile currency means that the value of all the Dogecoins in circulation has a value of about 75,000 million euros.

On Sunday, Musk’s initiative announced a space mission with his company SpaceX to be paid with Dogecoin. The mission involves sending a small satellite to the moon with a Falcon 9 rocket in early 2022.

It is not the first time that Musk, one of the richest persons in the world, has used his Twitter account to convey his opinion on cryptocurrencies.

In March, Musk said that US customers could buy Tesla vehicles with bitcoin, marking a major step forward for the use of cryptocurrency in everyday commerce. The electric car maker had bought $1.5 billion worth of bitcoins earlier this year, making significant profit in the subsequent hours.

The Tesla CEO’s survey of dogecoin received more than 2.5 million visits in four hours, with over two-thirds of those surveyed voting to ratify the new payment method.

Currently the coin that started as a joke is the fourth largest digital currency, reaching a record above $0.73 on Thursday. The billionaire’s tweets about financial situations of his companies have earned him sanctions from the SEC in the past, but his recent comments on cryptocurrencies haven’t caused him any regulatory reprimands.

Elon Musk Implicated in Twitter BTC Scam

Not all of the twitter community are in good terms with Musk, however, as his image is being used in a series of ongoing crypto fraud on Twitter.

Just before his anticipated appearance on “SNL,” it appears Elon Musk was once again the subject of a Twitter-based bitcoin scam that saw several of his social media followers receive BTC-related spam in their message feeds.

It seems like Elon Musk and his followers just can’t take a break in this department as Musk is constantly the target of various cryptocurrency-based social media scams. For the most part, it seems like a lot of these cases just use his image to perpetrate this dastardly act.

One such case occurred last summer when a teenager took over the Twitter accounts of various public and well-known figures, including former President Barack Obama, his Vice President Joe Biden and Microsoft mogul, Bill Gates. The teenager posted messages on these Twitter pages requesting that people forward their bitcoins to anonymous addresses. Once they did, their money would double simply because these numbers felt “generous.”

Well, no one who fell in love with the plan saw their money double. In fact, many of them saw their funds completely disappear. They had no idea that these accounts had been maliciously compromised, and that the person at the helm was just looking for some extra digital money that they could chuff in their pockets. Overall, the teenager took about $121,000 worth of BTC. He has since been arrested and has reached a plea deal that will see him serve a reduced sentence, allowing him return the stolen funds in a timely manner.

While this may be a step in the right direction, it appears that another instance of malicious bitcoin behavior has stepped in to take its place. A fraud tracker operating under the Twitter name @MalwareHunterTeam posted multiple screenshots on Twitter over the weekend showing images of verified accounts that appeared to have been compromised, one of which belonged to Musk.

The fraud tracker posted the following:

“ANOTHER VERIFIED ACCOUNT IS BEING USED TO SPREAD AN SNL/MUSK THEMED SCAM.” Before uncovering dozens of fraudulent activities.

Whoever has control of the account finally responded to the tweets that were sent to Musk. Additional tweets regarding potential cryptocurrency giveaways were also posted. These involved up to 5,000 BTC and more than 100 million Dogecoin, two assets that Musk has spoken highly of in the past.

What was the catch? Users had to send digital money first to be considered, much like last summer’s hack and a big red flag right now.

What were the draws?

The message related to Dogecoin, for example, reads as follows:

WE ARE READY TO PRESENT THE EVENT THAT WE ANNOUNCE TODAY IN OUR PROGRAM. WE WANT TO THANK OUR FOLLOWERS AND HELP THE ADOPTION OF CRYPTOCURRENCIES. 100,000,000 DOGES WILL BE DISTRIBUTED AMONG ALL THOSE WHO PARTICIPATE IN THIS EVENT.

The series of hackings, still ongoing, are so extensive that a verified Federal Government account also fell victim.

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Meticulous to a fault.

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