See The Age-Old Secrets of Modern Scams: From medieval forgers to online Elon Musk impersonators, con artists tell stories their victims want to hear by Ariel Sabar. Mr. Sabar is a journalist and the author of “Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife,” recently published by Doubleday. Excerpts:
"From the headlines last month, you’d have thought it was a hack for the ages. Scammers infiltrated the Twitter accounts of public figures like Barack Obama, Elon Musk and Kim Kardashian West, then tweeted an offer too good to be true: Send bitcoin and get paid back double. When a 17-year-old from Tampa, Fla., was charged on July 31 with orchestrating the scheme, prosecutors called him the “mastermind” of a “massive fraud…designed to steal money from regular Americans.”
But if the aim was to trick the celebrities’ millions of social media followers out of piles of money, it was something of a flop. The alleged culprits made off with an estimated $118,000, a pittance compared with a similar but less-noticed scam in June in which hackers impersonating Mr. Musk on YouTube took victims for as much as $464,000."
"impostor scams succeed less because of technical skill—like breaking into a high-profile account or imitating an artist’s brush strokes—than because of the ability to tell a convincing story, to plant a lie in an otherwise true tale.
The Twitter hackers got inside the accounts of famous people whose influence they sought to exploit, but posted generic messages that sounded a lot like one another and not particularly like the account holders. In the YouTube scam, on the other hand, channels disguised with the SpaceX logo played real video of Musk speaking at a conference. Framing the footage were captions about a “Special Event” that tied the video to the thrilling launches, days earlier, of SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Falcon 9 spacecraft.
The videos were live-streamed, as if Musk’s 2-for-1 bitcoin giveaway were unspooling in real time to viewers lucky enough to tune in. A linked website with “SpaceX” in its URL quelled doubt with a thoughtful-sounding message: “We understand the financial uncertainty that some people may be facing right now. SpaceX is here to offer all the help that we can.” Tucked into the alphanumeric bitcoin addresses where victims were asked to send money were the words “Musk” and “Space.”
Key to this immersive tale was its bogus protagonist. More than any other CEO, Mr. Musk, a tech-world sage with a reputation as an unpredictable iconoclast, seemed like someone who might well give cryptocurrency to strangers for his own inscrutable reasons. “If this was Bill Gates, I would’ve just scrolled past it,” a savvy internet user who nearly fell for the YouTube fraud told the online investigations website Bellingcat."
"The motives of con artists are as various as those of their victims. But whether the come-on is biblical or bitcoin, the best of them gild their stories with details drawn from the real world—to blind us to the one crucial detail that isn’t."
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