Did you fall for this scam on X?

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TOKENS FLOOD X FEED

I was on X a couple weeks back when a post with Elon’s face caught my attention.

The post was promoting a token pre-sale for X with the tagline ‘Join the future with new Elon Musk’s coin’.

Elon does some non-conventional things and is pro-crypto, so it’s not entirely out of the question that he would do some sort of creative financing via a token sale.

But right away, a few things were OFF. 

First, this was an ad. Anytime it’s an ad and not an organic post, you are being sold something.

And that’s normally okay, but the account running the ad made no sense. If Elon was actually conducting a token sale, do you really think he’d recruit ‘Peggy Longo’ to advertise the raise?

A few minutes later, I saw the same ad with the same text, but from another account.

Both accounts had textbook bot behavior - no organic posts and less than 15 followers each.

The ad coming from different accounts (I lately uncovered multiple others) is usually a pretty good indicator that something is fraudulent. The fraudsters know that their ads will get reported, and so they create multiple accounts in attempt to make X ‘whack-a-mole’ the scammy ads.

FRAUDSTERS TOKENIZE EVERYTHING

I reported the fraud directly to Elon Musk like the absolute NARC I am, and went about my day. But I quickly came to realize the fraud was even more widespread and rampant than I first imagined.

Soon I was getting inundated with token ads for Grok, TikTok, Apple, and even Kanye West.

As a marketer, I had a pretty good idea what they were doing by this.

The fraudsters were essentially A/B testing which ad worked the best. If TikTok coin is getting a 5x return on your ad spend and Kanye is only getting 2x, they can shift all of their budget to the higher performing ad.

And the ultimate winner in from their testing appeared to be Apple. After a week of seeing numerous brands in the scammy ads, it eventually just became Apple that was featured.

WELL IS IT WORKING??

The easiest way to tell if an ad is working…is if they keep running it. No point spending money on ads that aren’t working!

The Apple token ad has been running for 2+ weeks at the time of this writing so it appears to be doing pretty well for the scammers.

Digging into the (few) details of the Apple token, there appears to be a supply of 1M tokens, with each being sold for $4.50.

This implies a valuation of $4.5M dollars for a token that has no real affiliation with Apple, anonymous backers, and not even an attempt at a whitepaper.

In other words, $4.5M for a website that was probably made in 30 minutes.

I traced the token presale to an actual coin which is trading at $0.05, a 99%+ drop from the buy-in price.

The other coins (Kanye, Grok…) do not appear to have even listed a coin.

I went back to the Apple pre-sale page, which no longer exists. Instead, a message in Russian states that the page’s hosting ability has been blocked for failure to pay or another reason.

Hope everyone stayed safe from these tokens! Hit reply and let me know the craziest scam you’ve encountered 🔽