ORMOND BEACH, Fla. – Mike DeMalia thought his ship had come in.
A former truck driver from Massachusetts, DeMalia received a Facebook friend request from none other than Elon Musk.
Or so he thought.
“I thought I’d met Elon Musk,” DeMalia said. “We started talking about all sorts of things.”
The messages between DeMalia and the person he thought was Musk quickly turned from friendly banter to – you guessed it – Bitcoin and cryptocurrency investments. The Musk impersonator told Mike he could help him make money quickly and easily.
“Just the way he was talking, the messages sounded very articulate,” DeMalia said.
DeMalia said the person posing as Musk, suggested they move their conversation off Facebook and over to Telegram, a cloud-based messaging app. Despite some initial skepticism, DeMalia wanted to believe Musk had befriended him and simply wanted to keep things “private.”
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“I’ve got trust issues,” DeMalia told News 6. “I wouldn’t do anything unless I had confirmation. I said to FaceTime me.”
To DeMalia’s surprise, one morning he received a video chat call from whom he thought was Musk.
“It looked like him. It was his face. It sounded just like him,” DeMalia later recalled. “He said, ‘Hey Mike, how you doing today?’ I was like, holy s**t, it really is him.”
It wasn’t.
Though he didn’t know it at the time, DeMalia was on his way to becoming a victim of an elaborate social engineering scam powered by deepfake technology. When it was all said and done, he would end up losing $400.
“I was all excited. Everybody wants to get rich,” DeMalia said. “You know, I’m thinking about my grandkids. When I die, I’d be able to leave them all sorts of money. That wasn’t the case.”
Security expert Chris Hadnagy, who runs an Orlando company called Social Engineer, LLC, said these types of schemes are more common than most people realize. According to Hadnagy, the hallmarks of these types of scams – so called “social engineering” – are based on two things: emotion and urgency.
“I would love to get a real phone call from Elon Musk with an offer for an investment,” Hadnagy told us. “If that happens, you have to stop and think for a second, ‘Why would he call me?’”
“Somebody is trying to get you, influence you to take action that’s not good for you,” he added. “And they’re using basic understanding of how humans make decisions – things like fear, lust, greed. And they’re using those strong emotions to get someone to take action.”
DeMalia is far from the first person to fall for this kind of technology. He should also consider himself somewhat lucky.
In January 2024, a Hong Kong-based employee of the British engineering and design firm Arup was tricked into processing a wire transfer to criminals to the tune of over $25 million.
The incident happened during a video conference initiated by someone the worker thought was the firm’s UK-based chief financial officer. Even scarier: the conference call was attended by several of the employee’s coworkers.
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Everyone on the call – except for Arup’s Hong Kong employee – was a deepfake.
Arup is a world-famous consulting firm involved in the construction of both Australia’s Sydney Opera House and China’s Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing. The company has over 18,500 employees across 34 offices worldwide.
Hadnagy said today’s deepfake technology is evolving fast and can now create convincing live interactions.
“We go back a year, and you needed hours of video and audio to train things, and you need this really heavy equipment,” Hadnagy said. “You jump forward now, with probably five minutes of audio and a little bit of video, you can train a model to now deepfake what they call a digital skin… [it’s] like putting a mask on. I could become you or anyone else and even sound like you.”
And that deepfake video chat is exactly what was needed to convince DeMalia his “friend” was really Musk, who then guided DeMalia through what he thought was personalized step-by-step investing.
“Here I am thinking, ‘I’m talking to the master,’” Demalia said. “He walked me through everything. Take a screenshot, show it to me and I did. And he’d tell me, ‘Click on this, click on that.’”
The fake Musk had DeMalia put money in Cash App, then buy Bitcoin and then transfer those funds into an investment account called TSLA MARKETS PRO (it also goes by the name TSLA STOCK SAFE INVESTMENTS).
Part of the reason for those moves, DeMalia would realize later on, is that once funds are transferred through Bitcoin, they’re untraceable and almost impossible to recover.
“If I got robbed, maybe I get my money back from the bank or credit cards or whatnot,” he said. “But once you put into the Cash App and you buy Bitcoin through the Cash App, then you take the Bitcoin and you purchase it on his site, it’s gone.” DeMalia added, “Thank God it was only $400 even though $400 to me is like $4,000 to everybody out there.”
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Part of the scheme to get DeMalia to give up even more money was the professional quality of the website, complete with a live Tesla stock ticker. It showed how DeMalia’s $400 had already become $4,000 in a “virtual wallet” in a matter of days. The problem: DeMalia couldn’t withdraw those funds.
“When I tried [to initiate a withdrawal], my account says it’s not verified,” DeMalia explained. “I went through everything it said to do. I verified my account. Everything was fine. But he’s trying to tell me there’s a ‘mark’ that you have to hit to be able to pull [my money] out.”
The only thing that stopped DeMalia from losing even more money was that he only had $400 on hand when he made the initial investment.
“All I can see are dollar signs,” he said. And: “Oh, and I’m in the running to be able to win a car or a Cybertruck. That’s another cherry on top of the ice cream.”
Holly Salmons, president and CEO of the Better Business Bureau of Central Florida, said celebrity-based scams are on the rise.
“It is highly unlikely, if not impossible, that any celebrity is going to find you online via social media and need or want to be your friend,” Salmons said. “Do not ignore the red flags.”
“If cryptocurrency is not something that you feel well-versed in, social media is definitely not the place to get your feet wet,” Salmons noted, adding that 80% of people who reported falling victim to cryptocurrency scams in 2024 actually lost money.
“In the grand scheme of things, we have seen consumers who have lost tens of thousands, if not six figures,” she told News 6.
Each year, the BBB Institute for Marketplace Trust publishes a Scam Tracker Report, a compilation of findings analyzing the data behind scams (reporting, who’s getting scammed, profiles and definitions). If you enter the phrase “Elon Musk” in the Scam Tracker search tool, almost 150 search results pop up, many of them being stories very similar to DeMalia’s. In fact, investment scams, including those involving cryptocurrency, were deemed the riskiest scam of 2024 by the BBB, with a whopping 80% of those targeted reporting an out-of-pocket loss (the median being around $5,000).
Reflecting on what happened, DeMalia said, “Your common sense goes out the window.”
Still, he doesn’t want pity.
“I just want people to realize everybody can be a fool,” said DeMalia. “Everybody can make mistakes. I just want everybody to know, be careful. Because not everybody’s going to be as lucky as I am.”
He added that the worst part was thinking it was real.
To the scammers, DeMalia has this message: “I just want to say thank you for opening my eyes to the world of bend-over without getting kissed.”