Social media is filled with countless scammers trying to capitalize on Elon Musk’s name. Just take a look under any of Musk’s tweets and you’ll see people promising crypto giveaways, which are actually just scams that siphon money away from users. Are these scams really worth it? These are true. And I’ve obtained the stories to prove it.

In order to find out about consumer complaints against companies, I file Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), requests frequently with the FTC. Previously I’ve done this with FTX, Tinder and Canon just to name a few. It’s an interesting way to learn about customer service problems. But when I recently filed a FOIA request for complaints about Tesla, I received some documents that I didn’t expect.

The majority of complaints concerned Tesla. People were complaining about issues with financing and warranties. But consumers were also complaining about scams on social media where the con artists were using the Tesla brand and Elon Musk’s name to rip people off. And there were way more of these stories than I ever would’ve expected.

Almost all of the complaints were about crypto coins such as Ethereum
ETH
Bitcoin
BTC
Dogecoin can be used to fund your account.
DOGE
Ripple and TikTok were also sometimes mentioned. The scams seemed to be perpetrated across a wide number of social media platforms, and some of the complaints even discussed deepfake videos of Elon Musk saying things he never said–videos that have become incredibly common on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram.

Some of the scams involved cryptocurrencies with names like Mini Tesla and Tesla Token, while other scams had URLs involving space exploration and seemed to capitalize on Musk’s desire to send humans to Mars with his company SpaceX. One of the complaints even involved a person who claimed to work for Tesla, though I wasn’t able to confirm whether that was true, given the nature of the FTC’s redactions of the documents to protect the privacy of users.

It appears that many people realized the importance of not investing in suspect cryptocurrency online. But some of the complaints are heartbreaking precisely because it seems they didn’t learn their lesson. One example is when someone claims they were scammed out of their money after reading that Musk was creating a cryptocurrency token. However, it turns out this scheme is a fraud.

“They were running a token pre-sale for Tesla, I was interested. But I didn’t allow myself enough time to do my research on them before investing into what I thought was an actual pre-sale of a new Tesla token,” the complaint reads.

But the complaint to the FTC didn’t end there. Next is the most heartbreaking sentence.

“Elon did in fact release a new token, but the one I purchased was not the legit …read more

Source:: Social Media Explorer

Author: Aaron