Gizmodo filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the FTC to get complaints sent to the federal agency about crypto scams that pretend to be affiliated with Musk. We obtained 247 complaints, all filed between Feb. and Oct. of this year, and they’re filled with stories of people who believed they were watching ads for authentic crypto investments sanctioned by Musk on social media.

The ads sometimes featured the names of Musk’s various companies, like SpaceX, Tesla, and X, while other times they utilized Musk’s association with neo-fascist presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Some people in the complaints believed they were talking directly with Musk, a sadly common story that has popped up in news reports before. But they weren’t talking with Musk, of course. They were communicating with scammers engaging in what’s called pig butchering—the name for a type of fraud popularized in the mid-2010s where scammers extract as much money as possible through flattery and promises of tremendous profits if the victim just “invests” where they’re told.

  • Carighan Maconar
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    345 months ago

    I mean it makes sense to target these people. If you’re stupid enough to believe the shit Musk or Trump spout, you’re also stupid enough to not see these very obvious scams.

    • ZephrC
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      25 months ago

      They were at first, and if you find someone going on about Monero they still might be, but most of the crypto bubble was the dumber, less successful finance bros trying to go to the moon or whatever. They don’t actually understand crypto, they just use buzzwords to try to sell it to people.

  • MushuChupacabra
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    1825 months ago

    There’s a simple explanation for this. Elon Musk fans are fucking idiots.

    • @finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      They might also just be the target demographic for pig butchering.

      • Middle Class
      • Over 40
      • Conservative Male (lonely)
      • Greedy / Self-serving

      But yeah there is definitely correlation with low cognitive ability.

      • Echo Dot
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        285 months ago

        You also have to be the sort of person that genuinely believes you can get something for nothing. You have to have a relatively low IQ for that to be the case.

        You also have to have a relatively low IQ to continue to listen to anything Musk says, so the group are Self-Selecting.

        • @captainlezbian@lemmy.world
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          15 months ago

          Not really. You have to be the sort of person who understands that investment works and not how it works or why it works and most importantly why you aren’t going to hit the jackpot on it even though some people do. They’re the standard marks for an investment con. So yeah they’re stupid and self selected, but the mechanism of action is important because it shows us how to help people avoid falling for it not just letting us feel superior to those who do.

          • Echo Dot
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            25 months ago

            I feel like everyone understands the basic concept behind investment. But I also feel like pretty much everyone knows that there’s no such thing as a free lunch.

            Whenever you invest in something it’s pretty obvious what the other party’s motivations are. If you cannot see how the other party could possibly benefit, then it’s probably because it’s a scam.

        • ℍ𝕂-𝟞𝟝
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          45 months ago

          You need to believe that you can get ahead in society by being smarter than the competition, instead of just being luckier.

          They are naive if anything.

  • @cmrn@lemmy.world
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    175 months ago

    I feel like they don’t even need to be crypto schemes affiliated with Musk for that Venn diagram to work

  • @Snapz@lemmy.world
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    55 months ago

    The registered republican voter records are available for purchase - that list is such a gold mine of warm, qualified leads of the dumbest people. Cross reference above a certain threshold for affluent zip codes and split by age and you’re now holding the keys to hate-filled grandma’s pension.

  • @seaQueue@lemmy.world
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    315 months ago

    If only they had a safe place to put their money that was protected by law and insured against losses.

  • @S13Ni@lemmy.studio
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    165 months ago

    Ngl I always hated crypto but this is like best argument for crypto. Wtf I’m even doing at my job, I should be doing something actually important like scramming Elon Musk fans.

      • @S13Ni@lemmy.studio
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        45 months ago

        I don’t really like idea, I can’t see how it could be done in anyway that doesn’t lead to already rich people insider trading it.

      • Echo Dot
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        5 months ago

        I like the basic fundamental idea, but the implementation is dreadful.

        I’m all for coming up with some kind of method for validating decentralized information but the system that cryptocurrencies use is highly inefficient.

    • @Psythik@lemmy.world
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      -45 months ago

      Speak for yourself. Personally I turned $12K into $36K when the US government allowed bitcoin to be traded on the stock market as an ETF. Yet everyone here keeps trying to tell me that it’s a scam. Which is weird, because I bought a car, an OLED TV, and built a $4000 gaming machine with my “fake internet money”, as everyone here likes to call it.

      All this stuff I bought with my earnings seems real to me. But hey, keep downvoting and calling me an idiot, like you always do, when I bring up the point that not everyone is stupid enough to lose money with crypto.

      • @Sludgehammer@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Okay, hypothetically let’s imagine someone who is a Bitcoin trading god. Every peak he’s there unloading his bags, every dip and he’s buying hundreds of Bitcoins. This guy turns thousands into millions and millions into billions. Huge success story right?

        But here’s the rub, where is all this money coming from? The money isn’t coming out of thin air, it’s not coming from the crypto exchanges, otherwise they’d go bankrupt, it’s not coming from the value of any goods or services produced. The answer is that all that money is coming from other people. Someone has to be buying at the peak thinking it’ll go “To the moon” and getting burned, or maybe the need to pay off some hackers cryptolocker. The same for the dip maybe someone needs real money right now and must sell despite the loss, or maybe someone is panic selling thinking the price will go lower. Our hypothetical trading god hasn’t really created any money or anything of value at all, they’ve just moved money from the losers in the Bitcoin to his own wallet.

        This makes you the equivalent to one of the spokespeople from near the top of a pyramid scheme taking about how this is one of the legit pyramid schemes, because you’ve earned so much money! Ignoring of course that all of their money means that someone somewhere needed to lose that money first.

        However, I suppose at the end of the day, you did take twenty four thousand dollars from crypto morons, so I suppose that’s kinda noble in a way.