- A South Korean woman lost $50,000 after falling in love with a fake Elon Musk.
- The Musk impersonator befriended her on Instagram, where he told her he “contacts fans randomly.”
- Fake Musk then claimed that he could make the woman rich by helping her invest her money.
A South Korean woman claims she lost $50,000 to a scammer posing as Elon Musk.
“On July 17 last year, Musk added me as a friend on Instagram. Although I was a big fan of Musk after reading his biography, I doubted it at first,” said the woman, who declined to give her real name, in South. Korean television station KBS in an “In Depth 60 Minutes” interview broadcast on April 19, according to a translation by the Korea Herald.
The woman said she began to believe she was conversing with the real Musk after the person she was talking to sent her photos of what appeared to be Musk’s ID and images of him- even at work.
“‘Musk’ talked about his kids and taking a helicopter to work at Tesla or Space X,” she told KBS. “He also explained that he contacts fans randomly.”
The fake Musk, the woman said, even shared details about a meeting the real Musk had with South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol in April 2023. The impersonator said Yoon told “Musk” to build Tesla’s gigafactories in Seoul and Jeju.
“‘Musk even said ‘I love you, you know that?’ when we had a video call,” the woman said, referring to a video call with what was likely a deepfake of Musk.
The woman said the scammer eventually convinced her to transfer 70 million Korean won, or $50,000, to a bank account he said belonged to one of his Korean employees. The person behind the fake Musk claimed he would make the woman rich by investing her money, she told KBS.
Romance scams are also a very real problem in the United States. Romance scammers took $1.3 billion from their victims in 2022, according to the Federal Trade Commission.
This incident also isn’t the first time someone has hoped to gain fame or fortune by channeling Musk. In China, a Musk lookalike named Yilong Ma posted videos of himself on TikTok.
The videos caught the attention of Musk himself, who questioned whether Ma was a real person.
“I’d like to meet this guy (if he’s real). Hard to tell with deepfakes these days,” Musk said of Ma in a statement. Message in May 2022.
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