Did you watch the Musk, Trump, and Harris debate? Well, it was a scam

Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and Kamala Harris all sat down to discuss the US presidential election in a recent debate. It sounds like the beginning of a terrible joke, and in a way it is.

The Tesla CEO, former US president, and current US vice president didn’t actually sit down to chat cordially about the upcoming election. Instead, this “debate” was an elaborate ruse to promote a cryptocurrency scam.

Thousands of people were lured into watching a heated deepfake debate depicting Musk, Trump, and Harris – a conversation that conveniently included and encouraged viewers to invest in crypto.

Infoblox, an IT automation and security company based in Silicon Valley, said that the “debate” was streamed from hijacked YouTube accounts with millions of followers, making it look reputable.

The livestream racked up hundreds of thousands of viewers. At its height, there were roughly 184,000 people watching one of the live deepfaked videos.

YouTube eventually removed the videos, but some were still available for over 12 hours after the so-called debate had finished. This, in turn, deceived more viewers.

According to Infoblox, who first reported the scam via Mastodon, the videos all featured QR codes that sent users to domains posing as the presidential candidates' websites or cryptocurrency platforms.

“The scam sites use domain names that are lookalikes to cryptocurrency sites, Tesla, and the debate, e.g., trump-debate[.]com,” Infloblox said.

When looking at the origin of the domains, the company said that the domains all have links to Russia in varying degrees. For example, some domains use a Russian registrar or hosting provider.

Once victims scan these QR codes they are directed to sites that urge them to link their crypto wallets to win an undisclosed prize. In this instance, victims were asked to send funds to a specific crypto wallet address that belonged to cybercriminals.

Infoblox found various wallets, one of which accumulated over $4,000 in Dogecoin transactions.

This incident further exemplifies the increasing exploitation of political, cultural, and societal events by threat actors in order to make a quick buck.