A collage showing Elon Musk and a woman in love.
Credit: Reuters, iStock Photo
An Elon Musk impersonator who successfully convinced a South Korean woman that he was the actual deal, conned her of $50,000 (70 million won) after she fell in love with him.
According to a report by Business Insider, the Musk impersonator first contacted the woman in July last year, claiming that he (posing as the actual Musk) was in the habit of randomly reaching out to fans.
Baffled by what was unfolding, the woman, who declined to provide her real name, refused to believe that she had befriended the mercurial billionaire.
However, after the impersonator showed her photos of what appeared to be Musk's work ID, and of the billionaire working in his office, she fell for the scam.
"I experienced something like a dream last year. On July 17 last year, Musk added me as a friend on Instagram. Although I have been a huge fan of Musk after reading his biography, I doubted it at first," the woman told Korean broadcaster KBS.
"'Musk' talked about his children and about taking a helicopter to work at Tesla or Space X. He also explained that he contacts fans randomly," she explained when talking about her experience of getting scammed.
As they bonded, the woman even asked the fake Musk about an actual meeting that the billionaire had had with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in April 2023, but the scammer was prepared.
"Yoon talked about 'Let's establish Gigafactories in Seoul and Jeju'," the impersonator told the woman, easing her initial doubts about his identity.
The woman's doubts about the identity of the man she was talking to were finally laid to rest after she got on to a video call with the impersonator. “'Musk’ even said, ‘I love you, you know that?’ when we made a video call," she said.
But as it turns out, the video call utilised a deepfake video of Musk to dupe the woman.
Having convinced the woman that he was the real deal, the impersonator then requested her to transfer $50,000 (70 million won) to a bank account that he claimed belonged to one of his Korean employees. He even promised to invest the money and make the woman rich, telling her, "I am happy when my fans are getting rich because of me."
The woman, convinced about the authenticity of the video call, obliged, and ended up losing the money.
Interestingly, this isn't the first instance of an Musk doppelganger showing up on the internet.
A couple of years back, a Chinese man named Yilong Ma had gone viral for his similarity to Elon Musk.
It even prompted the billionaire to say, "I’d like to meet this guy (if he is real). Hard to tell with deepfakes these days."