Metallica will release its new album on April 14, 2023: 72 Seasons. There is little that can get in the way of the famous American metal band, you would think. But crypto scammers keep popping up like mushrooms, and even Metallica is now affected. The band warns its fans.
Metallica suffers from crypto scams
Last week, Metallica announced the new album along with the song Lux Æterna and a tour. Since then the band has been dealing with scammers, writes it on social media. Via YouTube videos and live streams and via specially created websites scammers reach their targets. To be precise, these are crypto giveaways, or fake giveaways.
Unfortunately, Metallica does not mention specific tokens or account names, but it does emphasize that only the official social media can be trusted. That includes only metallica.com, livemetallica.com, and the accounts on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter with the username @metallica.
Scammers are getting more and more creative with forging these usernames. As Metallica says, “Always seek official verification before taking anything crazy as true. Thank you to everyone who helped bring these live streams to YouTube.” However, these verifications can also be abused.
— Metallica (@Metallica) December 6, 2022
Crypto scammers are getting better and better
Scammers are getting better at hiding their evil intentions. For example, you can hide the “I” in a Twitter name by using the horizontal bar “|” to use. On Twitter, the difference is not visible because of the font.
Scammers are also increasingly working with so-called deep fakes. For example, fake images of former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried were used in a deepfake a few weeks ago. He supposedly urged FTX customers to transfer tokens, after which ‘FTX’ would double the amount. Of course these images were not real and you lost your crypto if you fell for it.
According to a recent survey, the Web3 world suffers from about 15 scams per hour, and criminals even buy identities on the black market.
Over the weekend, a verified account posing as FTX founder SBF posted dozens of copies of this deepfake video offering FTX users “compensation for the loss” in a phishing scam designed to drain their crypto wallets pic.twitter.com/3KoAPRJsya
— Jason Koebler (@jason_koebler) November 21, 2022