Scammers on the popular social media website for professionals, LinkedIn, have increased their efforts by impersonating famous crypto figures in live video calls. Kyle Pierce, the co-founder of a crypto startup called uPlexa, stated that he was contacted by “William Chang,” who’s one of the core team members of Ledger Capital, on LinkedIn. The problem is, this “William Chang” is not the real William Chang but a scammer who impersonated a video of him.
The alleged “William Chang” mentioned that he was seeking new projects to invest in, and he made an offer to Pierce via Skype. Pierce was already suspicious of this offer, but he decided to move forward to see what was the real intention. After several weeks of delayed call schedules, eventually, Pierce met this “William Chang” on a Skype call.
Inside the meeting, the fake “William Chang” claimed that he was working with the TRON Foundation on a new project that could help new crypto startups doing unique things within the crypto space.
Pierce quickly noted there was something weird during the call. This fake “William Chang” kept talking visually even when there was no audio. Furthermore, the video looked like there was some edited loop going on, because “Chang’s” mouth was active all the time even when Pierce was the one talking on the call.
The final nail in the coffin was when Pierce received a fake email after the end of the call. The email looked like it came from Tron.network’s domain, even though it was only an old email spoofing trick. Pierce decided to investigate the email, and he found out that it was a fake and shady IP address that sent the email to him.
In the end, Pierce was called by another impersonator. This time the scammer impersonated video of Tron’s CEO, Justin Sun, with another pre-recorded video. The same trick that was used by the fake “William Chang”.
According to one of uPlexa’s Discord channel community members, similar scams are being operated all over social media. Typically these scammers would look at tons of videos with famous crypto figures talking, and they would edit these videos to prey on unsuspecting victims. There’s no deepfake technology being used here, but it’s merely clip mashups and editing from various event meetups.
Source: Decrypt
