Facebook has falsely verified an Egyptian fan page of Elon Musk. The operators of the site use the fact for a Bitcoin scam.
Menlo Park – After Facebook had turbulent weeks full of scandals, failures and the subsequent name change to Meta, the next faux pas is now on the list. Facebook has wrongly verified a suspected Bitcoin fraudster as Tesla boss Elon Musk.
The account called “ElonMuskoffici” had a white confirmation tick on a blue background, signaling that it was the official website of the Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder. In reality, however, it was a Facebook fan page from Egypt, as the US tech portal “The Verge” reported. The page still accessible until Tuesday morning (November 2nd, 2021) was blocked by Facebook on Tuesday afternoon.
Facebook: mistakes enable identity theft
The actual operator of the Facebook page had tried to jump on an old scam, which up to now can mainly be found on Twitter. Said fraudsters pretend to be Elon Musk, who is known as a supporter of crypto currencies such as Bitcoin or Dogecoin. The fake Tesla bosses urge users in the posts to send Bitcoins to a certain address in order to get double the amount back. In this bitcoin lottery, however, the victims go away empty-handed and never see their cryptocurrency again.
The page falsely verified by Facebook had more than 150,000 followers before it was banned by Facebook. Facebook had previously verified a fake Elon Musk with a confirmation tick (ElonMuskofficia1), as research in the Internet archive “WayBackMachine” shows.
Facebook verification from Elon Musk fan page
Account owners must provide proof of identity, such as a passport or driver’s license, during Facebook verification. Sometimes fraudsters manage to rename pages that have already been verified without Facebook’s knowledge, without Facebook revoking the original verification, and thus taking on a new identity. (Lukas Zigo / dpa)
