I fell for a deepfake Elon Musk’s cryptocurrency scam bait

A lesson in deepfakes, Ponzi schemes, and YouTube algorithm manipulation.

Something pretty weird happened this morning - I fell for a deepfake Elon Musk’s cryptocurrency scam bait.

I started on YouTube, knowing that the Starship’s 4th launch was this morning (an extremely impressive engineering feat), and I wanted to watch the footage.

Searching “spacex starship” and checking the live videos, I was greeted with a deluge of results, including (weirdly) multiple from SpaceX itself. I clicked on one, intending to watch a recording of this morning’s launch.

Elon was on stage in front of a small crowd, the massive Starship engines behind him and a slideshow to his right. He was midway through some sort of presentation, so I figured I’d sort of get some work done while listening to him in the background.

I found myself halfway through some sort of speech about Bitcoin, which… was strange for a SpaceX launch, but not wildly out of character.

Except then I kept listening. And it became clear that “Elon” was selling me on a once-in-a-lifetime chance to immediately double my Bitcoin and Ether, in a multi-million-dollar SpaceX giveaway, which I could do by scanning the QR code on the screen.

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…What?

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How was the richest man on Earth shilling an obvious crypto Ponzi scheme?

Why was the richest man on Earth shilling an obvious crypto Ponzi scheme?

I was intrigued. Clearly this was a scam - one with a deepfake Elon Musk, no less. But whoever was running it had invested a lot into making it work, and I wanted to see how far the rabbit hole went.

So, dear reader, I took the bait. I scanned the QR code¹. But more on that later.

Anatomy of a crypto scam

First, I wanted to understand how I had gotten hoodwinked. Because the video I found myself staring at was pretty damn convincing.

It had the SpaceX logo. It had 75,000 live viewers. The one giveaway might have been the informal title, but it wasn’t obviously wrong. That said, when I clicked into the channel details, it became obvious that it was a fraud - they were streaming no less than four “Starship launches” simultaneously from a different user with no SpaceX affiliation.

Over 200,000 viewers were watching these scams concurrently, though of course it’s impossible to say how many were real people.

What about Elon, then? After looking closer, the video was actually pretty cleverly staged in a few different ways to make the scam come together.

The audio was impressively convincing. The voice cloning was impeccable, though that isn’t the impressive part. On top of the AI voice, the creators layered sounds effects, like mic echo and audience applause. I think these second-order audio cues were was lulled me into a false sense of security to begin with.

“Dubble”

Most shots were “Elon” speaking to the crowd. Because most shots were taken from a wide angle, you can’t actually see Elon’s mouth moving and thus can’t tell what he should be saying. At that point, all of the messaging comes from the audio and the presentation slides.

The slides next to “Elon” were photoshopped. Cleverly, the scammers created additional “proof” of authenticity by photoshopping the slides that Elon was presenting. I suppose they had to, since hearing Elon promote a Bitcoin scam while he presented images of Mars would have been too jarring.

This is a deepfake.

Brief, up-close shots of “Elon” were deepfaked. This is where things obviously fell apart, once I knew to pay attention. When the video cuts to a close-up, the tell-tale signs of a deepfake are visible. His face and mouth are jittery as he walks around the stage, and are briefly out-of-sync with his words.

This was planned out months in advance. Perhaps the most important element of this scam was the timing. There’s a brief window where millions of people are searching for Starship launch footage, and then interest drops significantly. But I dug up the original presentation, and it turns out it was for the Starship’s third launch, which occurred nearly two months ago.

What the original presentation looked like.

What now?

In my case, I was lucky enough to realize it was a scam, even before scanning the QR code and visiting the accompanying website - which was also impressively done, by the way.

Nothing about this screams “clearly fraud,” which the one exception of the richest man on Earth shilling an obvious crypto Ponzi scheme. But would it be understandable if my parents or grandparents fell for something like this? Yeah, probably².

I would suggest that YouTube do something about this, but based on my experience I know that it’s unlikely these things will be taken down fast enough to prevent people from falling for the scam. In my screenshot above, there were over 200,000 viewers watching the livestreams of a single fraud channel, let alone the dozens - if not hundreds - of copycats.

It would be easy to think that people who sent their money were suckers, or deserved it somehow (especially given Elon’s polarizing nature). But this kind of thing is repeatable with almost any public figure whose audience is naturally trusting. If your parents saw a video of a well-known politician/celebrity/religious figure asking for donations, would they know the difference?

And what about you? I’ve included a recording of the video below - if you didn’t already know it was a scam, how long would it take to figure it out?

1. I didn’t send any actual crypto, mostly because I don’t own any. But I’m pretty sure the scammers would either double my money (if it was a small enough amount) or steal it (if it was large).

2. Though if my grandparents were savvy enough to be able to send cryptocurrency via a QR code, I’d be extremely impressed.