A Michael Saylor impersonator has managed to dupe a Bitcoin investor for $1.1 million in the latest giveaway scam.
Bitcoin giveaway scam activity continues to rock the Satoshi Streets stripping investors of millions of dollars. Last Saturday, January 15, a Bitcoin investor lost a staggering $1.1 million to online impersonators posing as MicroStrategy chief executive officer Michael Saylor.
Twitter handle Whale Alert was the first to report the scam calling it “the single largest payment ever to a fake giveaway”. It further added that the payment was most likely made through a Coinbase address.
🚔 A payment of 26 #BTC (1,124,191 USD) was just made to a confirmed Michael Saylor Giveaway scam!https://t.co/YNYRBLBt4P
— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) January 15, 2022
The theft basically occurred through a website and YouTube. Both have been “confirmed” as scam platforms used by con artists who are impersonating Michael Saylor. Since then, the YouTube channel has been taken down and a visit to the website will show an error message. As reported, a staggering 26.5 BTC was sent to the suspicious address.
Michael Saylor has been one of the biggest Bitcoin proponents since August 2020. Over the last 18 months, his firm MicroStrategy has added a staggering 124,391 BTC to its balance sheet. This is the largest-ever Bitcoin holding by a public-traded company. Responding to Whale Alert, Saylor wrote:
“[At least] 489 of these scams were launched on YouTube last week. We report them every 15 minutes and they are taken down after a few hours, but the scammers just launch more.”
This has been the largest fake giveaway involving Michael Saylor. Back in November 2021, someone had sent 3 BTC to a different giveaway address impersonating the MicroStrategy CEO.
Bitcoin Scam Activity on the Rise
Over the last year, the number of Bitcoin and crypto scams have been on the rise. Scammers have been impersonating several popular personalities from the crypto and the business world. Last year, billionaire Elon Musk joined the crypto bandwagon with Tesla adding Bitcoin to its balance sheet.
Post that we have seen a flood of new social media accounts impersonating Elon Musk. Most of these accounts usually appear on platforms like Twitter and YouTube.
As per the 2020 report from Whale Alert, scammers have been finding it very easy to scam people with their Bitcoins. Besides, the nature of these schemes has become unbelievably professional and aggressive.
Whale Alert monitors more than 9,214 scam websites and nearly 100,000 fraudulent crypto addresses. Besides, it has also tracked more than $803 million in stolen digital assets worldwide.
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