Scams are evolving with technology, so it is not surprising that cyber crooks are following trend in the bid to defraud the uninformed.
The Japanese billionaire, Yusaku Maezawa on January 1, 2020 announced a social experiment in which he planned to gift $9 million to twitter followers. The competition which closed on January 7 required participants to share the tweet among other actions.
Nevertheless, it has inspired fraudsters to create fake giveaway scams that could be detrimental to uninformed crypto users. The latest of the scam giveaways supposedly from Maezawa seen by Cryptoinfowatch was published on medium. According to the fake giveaway, the fake billionaire wannabe wrote:
“This will be a social experiment conducted in Japan that’ll draw global attention. I am launching the semi-annual, my cryptocurrency airdrop promotion for Bitcoin, and Ethereum!”
However, the site linked to the giveaway, maezawacrypto.info and
yusaku2020.org are phishing sites meant to compromise the wallet security of the users. Furthermore, users are instructed to verify their wallets by sending some coins with the promise of receiving twice the value of the sent coins.
As expected, those that send BTC, ETH or XRP lose their digital assets to the fraudster operating the scheme.
On the second scam site yusaku2020.org , the fraudster wrote:
“Bonus: If you send in 5 BTC or 250 ETH, you will get the Grand Prize: a brand new Tesla Model S Performance with Midnight Silver Metallic, Solid Black and Red Multi-Coat exterior, delivery included. If you did that, just make sure to DM me on Twitter or reach me out at giveaway@maezawaotoshidama.com and we’ll sort everything out. And yes, you will also get 10 BTC or 500 ETH with this!”
A look at the fraudster’s wallet shows that there already are some deposits in them. It is not clear if the deposits are from the fraudsters in a bid to create impression that it is a working scheme. There is the possibility that some users are fooled by scams such as this.
Yusaku Maezawa, who owns Japan’s largest clothing chain, Zozotown was made globally popular after it made headlines that he would be the first private passenger to be flown to the moon by SpaceX, the Elon Musk’s space exploration project.
