A YouTube Live broadcast that ran for five hours today used a deepfake of Elon Musk to push a cryptocurrency scam, in the latest of a series of similar bogus streams. The video, which has has since been taken down, showed a clip of Musk that was meant to look like a livestream from a Tesla event, with an AI-generated version of his voice instructing viewers to visit a website and deposit their bitcoin, Ethereum or Dogecoin in order to participate in a giveaway.
Over 30,000 viewers were tuned into the stream at one point , pushing it to the top of YouTube’s Live Now recommendations. The account masquerading as Tesla, @elon.teslastream, had the Official Artist Channel verification badge, so we may be looking at an account hack. Both the video and the channel were removed after Engadget reached out to Google. We’ll update this article if we hear back with any more information.