Microsoft accidentally promotes fake Amazon website pushing an Elon Musk bitcoin scam

The scam encouraged people to invest in cryptocurrency, claiming that users could ‘become the next millionaire’

(Getty Images)

A fake ‘Amazon’ website that attempts to scam people out of money under the impression they are investing in Tesla was accidentally promoted on Microsoft’s news website.

The news platform displays a range of stories from national media publications in a grid, occasionally punctuated by an advert. This page automatically opens when Microsoft Edge users load a new tab.

The page, titled ‘Tesla Opportunity You Don’t Want To Miss’, appears three times (The Independent)

The advert, titled “Tesla Opportunity You Don’t Want To Miss” and which can take up to one fifth of the Microsoft News screen, directed users to a website called “Amazon Tutoring”.

The website, ‘Amazon Tutoring’, claims high returns on stock investments and encourages a minimum investment of £250, but a small disclaimer at the bottom of the page informs users that it is “intended for promotional literature that uses storytelling to illustrate the scope of the offered services and products. Therefore, the story told in this site is an advertorial or information & function-related advertisement, for better understanding of the proposed idea.”

The apparently fraudulent Amazon Tutoring website also states that its company headquarters is on the 85th floor of One World Trade Centre, despite the company not appearing on the list of tenants for the building. Its Facebook page contains no posts and has only 53 likes. Amazon’s official Facebook page, by contrast, has 29 million likes.

Similar pages, with the same text, have been spotted on fraudulent copies of the Mirror website, among others.

On a separate section of the website, inaccessible from the main homepage, is a blog post that mimics the look of Microsoft’s own MSN Money page in an apparent attempt to seem more reputable to unsuspecting viewers but lacks the “powered by Microsoft News” subheading, has no clickable drop-down menu, and the search box does not work.

The post claims that in 2021 Tesla and SpaceX head Elon Musk encouraged Gayle King, the host of CBS’s This Morning, to deposit £250 in an “automated trading algorithm” and that, “within three minutes”, her investment had almost doubled.

The blog post uses screenshots from an interview that Mr Musk did conduct with Ms King, but the interview took place in 2018, not 2021, and was about Mr Musk’s Boring Company, rather than investments.

On the left, the scam website; on the right, the genuine CBS interview from 2018 (The Independent)

From that post, the website encourages users to visit a poorly made website called “Bitcoin Motion” that claims they can “become the next millionaire” and encourages them to sign up for an account and deposit €250.

Despite showing profits in Euros, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICAAN) which coordinates domains reveals that the website is registered from Bedfordshire.

Microsoft Advertising policies “strive to provide a safe online environment for our users and our partners” and insists that “ads must be fair and clear; ads cannot be misleading, fraudulent, deceptive” for both fiat and digital currencies.

“We have numerous control measures to identify advertisements that do not comply with our policies, and terms of services including the ingestion and blocking of the FCA unauthorised domain lists”, Microsoft said in a statement to The Independent.

“We continually work to improve our tools and processes which include both automated and human intervention. We also encourage people to report possible deceptive or fraudulent ads they may be seeing, so we can review and take necessary action”, Microsoft continued. The company did not go into detail about what these measures were nor why such an obvious scam managed to bypass them.

Scams mentioning Elon Musk are common and plague many platforms including Microsoft’s. Twitter is constantly banning users who purchase and rebrand blue-tick accounts in an attempt to scam hundreds of thousands of dollars out of unsuspecting people via bitcoin.

An investigation by The Independent in 2018 found that more than 400 people sent $180,000 in bitcoin to one address associated with a similar scam, under the impression they would receive a share of a fake $64 million giveaway.

Fake adverts on news platforms, aggregators, and social media sites are a problem that has plagued the industry for years. In October, the United States Federal Trade Commission reported that complaints about scams on social media had tripled in 2020, with innocent people losing up to $117 million between January and June alone.

The existence of ‘chumbox ads’ on news websites, usually found at the bottom of articles and using headlines that can appear like those on legitimate articles, have also made it more difficult for users to tell what is authentic and what is not.

Large technology giants, who make hundreds of billions of dollars more than even some of the biggest media organisations, have struggled to properly moderate their platforms even with their vast resources.

Scammers have been found to be able to put fake businesses on Google’s and Facebook’s pages “within hours”, according to a 2020 investigation by Which?, and garner up to 100,000 impressions in a single month.