Facebook’s attempts to tag popular accounts it deems suspicious don’t always yield the desired results. The social media giant had previously made headlines for approving suspicious pages. The same happened again.
According to The Verge’s report, Facebook confirmed a Facebook fan page prepared for Elon Musk as Musk’s own official account during these verification processes. Moreover, this page appears to be run by a Bitcoin scammer.
The page, which has about 153,000 followers, admits from the beginning that it is not actually Musk. In the About section it says: “This is a fan page, we’re uploading tweets from him, etc.” But the URL ends with “ElonMuskoffici”, which means they’re definitely acting like it’s official. In the Page Transparency section it says that the people who manage the page are “Egyptian based”.
The account is currently not live. It is not clear whether Facebook removed the page or whether it was closed by the page owners. Before it was shut down, the account had 11 posts, most of which were reposts of Musk’s tweets. The most recent one was clearly a fake Bitcoin lottery. The most recent post was posted on October 21.
The page was originally created under the name “Kizito Gavin” on July 28, 2019 and has undergone several name changes since then. On October 17, he changed his name to Elon Musk.
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