From Business Insider via AOL, April 24:
- 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 he could make the woman rich by helping her invest her money.
A South Korean woman says she lost $50,000 to a con artist who was posing as Elon Musk.
"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, who declined to provide her real name, told South Korean broadcaster KBS in an "In Depth 60 Minutes" interview that aired April 19, per a translation from The Korea Herald.
The woman said she began to believe that 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 card and images of himself at work.
"'Musk' talked about his children and about 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 that 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 made a video call," the woman said, referencing a video call with what was likely to be a deepfake of Musk....
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