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lionkor parent
Not to victim-shame or anything, but that sounds more like more than one safety mechanism failed, the convincing tech only being a rather small part of it?
knicholes
Yes, more than one safety mechanism failed. Coinbase actually flagged the transaction, but I was so desperate to get it to go through, I went through their facial validation process to expedite the transaction. If I hadn't for just a couple more minutes, I'd have realized it was a scam.
prawn
Scams usually have an element of urgency so you don't stop to think.

Why did you and your graduate friends think an insanely rich man with a huge number of staff needed your financial help in testing transactions? This reminds me of those people that fall for celebrity love scams, where a rich celebrity needs their money - just baffling.

hansonkd
I think the biggest failure is on the part of the companies hosting these streams.

Its been a while, but I remember seeing streams for Elon offering to "double your bitcoin" and the reasoning was he wanted to increase the adoption and load test the network. Just send some bitcoin to some address and he will send it back double!

But the thing was it was on youtube. Hosted on an imposter Tesla page. The stream had been going on for hours and had over ten thousand people watching live. If you searched "Elon Musk Bitcoin" During the stream on Google, Google actually pushed that video as the first result.

Say what you want about the victims of the scam, but I think it should be pretty easy for youtube or other streaming companies to have a simple rule to simply filter all live streams with Elon Musk + (Crypto|BTC|etc) in the title and be able to filter all youtube pages with "Tesla" "SpaceX" etc in the title.

betterhealth12
What are your thoughts on this being solved by the negative of the situation? So, instead of having to vet every single stream, tweet etc to check if it's legit, basically the idea is that you shouldn't "trust" what you are seeing unless it's explicitly endorsed via a signature from the original creator.

Obviously, if it's coming from their official channels the "signature" can be more obvious, but a layer that facilitates this could do a lot of good imo.

lionkor OP
I feel like somehow that would lessen it, but not really help much? There are obviously people with too much money in BTC who are trying to take any gamble to increase its value. It sounds like a deeper societal issue.
jfoster
You are right that they might never be able to get it to 0, but shouldn't they lessen it if a simple measure like the one described can prevent a bunch of people from getting fooled by the scam?

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