Scammers are once again capitalizing on the popularity of Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence chatbot Grok, with fake tokens again emerging as part of potential phishing attacks.

A wallet linked to former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao received 90 million fake Grok (GROK) tokens on April 21, according to blockchain security firm PeckShield.

The tokens are “likely a scam,” since the “deployer distributed it to multiple addresses via multisend,” PeckShield said.

Source: PeckShieldAlert

The X platform’s Grok AI chatbot has no official cryptocurrency and no plans to launch one in the future.

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Fake Grok-related tokens first emerged in 2023 when a scammer deployed an ERC-20 Grok token on Ethereum, which led to an over 90% drop after the deployer sold 0.5% of the total supply, according to blockchain data visualization platform, Bubblemaps.

Fake GROK ERFC-20 token crash, 2023. Source: Bubblemaps 

Scammers often capitalize on the credibility of social media platforms, large brands, or celebrities like Elon Musk to cultivate a sense of trust with victims.

Meta was the most mimicked brand in phishing reports filed throughout 2024, according to a report by email security provider Mailsuite.

US brands are often impersonated by scammers. Source: Mailsuite

Coinbase was the most impersonated brand by scammers in the crypto industry, but Meta was targeted by over 25 times as many scammers as the cryptocurrency exchange.

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Elon Musk-related scams and fake coins see a resurgence

Elon Musk-related scams and fake tokens are seeing a resurgence as scammers continue vying for investors’ crypto holdings.

A fake announcement claiming to be an official “AI Elon Musk stream” giving away $20,000 worth of cryptocurrency was flagged on April 14 by crypto recovery and security advocate, Denis Thomas.

Source: Denis Thomas 

Multiple other Elon Musk-related memecoins were launched on the BNB Smart Chain in recent weeks, according to a scam detector platform, Coinspeedrun.

Source: Coinspeedrun

Phishing scams like address poisoning involve tricking victims into sending assets to fraudulent wallet addresses.

Phishing scams cost the crypto industry over $1 billion across 296 incidents in 2024, making them a major threat, according to blockchain security firm CertiK.

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