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Comment by stri8ed | Hacker News Reader

I think they could have done a lot better by having Elon tweet out a new product preorder page (limited edition Tesla merch?), which accepts payments in crypto. Really anything other than give me X so I can give you 2X, which has been done to death already. 100k is chump change, historically for this class of scam.

Another idea is, hijack customer service request DM's from crypto exchanges, and lead customer to phishing login page. Perhaps could athorize API access to the account, and then change email back to original, without the owner realizing account breach.

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The traffic burst would be huge for the Tesla tweet. That type of scam introduces more complexity, such as requiring hosting for millions of visitors in an hour, which can leave a traceable trail.

Compromised aws or similar accounts shouldn't be that hard for someone to get hold of at that point though?

You could probably make the whole site fairly convincing with just static files & some js which would be super easy to scale up with just a free cloudflare account or something along those lines

Hosting for millions of visitors/hour isn't that hard. Maybe the cloud companies want to make you think otherwise, but a handful of bare metal servers around the world should be enough to handle that kind of load unless you're streaming video or running a really heavy web framework. Those can easily be obtained for free if you're already a criminal and have access to compromised servers or stolen credit cards to buy them with.

The point isn't tech scalability - the point is that scaling to that many visitors requires payment, and many cloud providers have anti-fraud mechanisms in place to prevent scammers from doing this quickly and easily without being traceable.

They wouldn't have needed a site. The tweet could have included the address and mentioned "first 10000 people to send X Bitcoin get the new Tesla Y"

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