I stupidly lost ~$3000 in a crypto currency scam.

I am an idiot.

I was browsing Twitter and saw a post that appeared to be Elon Musk tweeting about a "New Years Crypto Party Giveaway". I navigated to the website in the tweet and it appeared that Elon Musk was giving away crypto and all you had to do was send in some crypto to verify your wallet address and they would send back what you sent plus up to double what you sent in back. In the moment everything looked legit to me and it seemed that there was a limited amount of time that this would last so I stupidly and frantically rushed to my CoinBase account and sent 0.4BTC or around $3000 USD. Immediately after I sent the money I got scared and regretted not doing more verification on my end to verify the giveaway. Low and behold after only a little digging it became very clear that I just got scammed.

Here was the tweet I saw: https://twitter.com/Eric77461769/status/1213122989480271877?s=20

The website in the tweet was https://muskfun.info/ and it appeared to redirect to a legit Medium Article by Elon Musk. I then clicked the Bitcoin giveaway link in the article and it took me here: https://muskfun.info/btc/

The final site I went to is where I was instructed to send the Bitcoin. It looked legit to me at the time and there was a live log of transactions. But had I looked just a little deeper I would have realized so many signs that this was a scam.

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1. I never checked Elon Musks Official Twitter Account to validate that he made this tweet. I just looked at the screenshot that someone else fabricated for this scam. Initially I was a little skeptical but figured I would checkout the website anyway. Elon has been known to do some crazy things.
2. The URL took me to a convincing clone of a Medium Article with Elon Musk as the author but it was actually not a redirect as the URL still said https://muskfun.info/ which in its self is a suspicious website name that should have tipped me off. All the comments were raving about how this worked but they were obviously doctored as well.
3. The final website was the same as the Medium article except it had /btc at the end.
4. Countless other things I should have noticed but did not.

I'm upset that I lost my money but I could have lost a lot more. I'm mostly just embarrassed. I'm a Software Developer at a large tech company and even used to work at Geek Squad so I am very familiar with these kind of scams. I never thought something like this would happen to me because I consider myself very tech savvy consumer.

I did some Google searching to see if there was any way for me to get my money back through any legal means or by reporting fraud to Coinbase but as I guessed with Crytpo you are pretty much out of luck.

Thanks for listening to my story. Feel free to laugh at my expense. Learn from my mistake. If anyone knows how to give this scammer payback feel free to let me know how!

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EDIT: Here is the log of my transaction: https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/e806b41205e82452768d1bd7fded2b7e2cfdcd976e469daf07d7a8520f98a930

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https://preview.redd.it/psdm7o4s0m841.png?width=1241&format=png&auto=webp&s=aeeff0a2794734deee537072ec8468cb7b879396

Submitted January 04, 2020 at 02:50AM by SigmaInigma http://bit.ly/39BhUSL