Fraudsters continue to use sophisticated techniques to steal people's encrypted assets. In the latest such case, a fraudster tried to deceive the founder of the uPlexa blockchain startup by falsifying his identity and introducing himself as William Chang (Ledger's chief financial officer for Ledger's hard work). The scammer used the archive videos of William Chang and Justin Sun to voice them so he could use them in video calls.
In a Medium article published on Sunday, Kyle Pierce, founder and lead developer of the blockchain startup uPlexa, explained that he had contacted William Chang, Ledger's director of operations and business development at LinkedIn. The man, who identified himself as Chang, claimed to be looking for investment projects and offered Pierce a Skype call. Pierce decided to accept the very dubious offer. After weeks of "programming inconsistencies," the two finally set a date. "He introduced himself and his company to TRON on a new confidential project to work with other cryptocurrency projects that do unique work," Pierce wrote.

A man who introduced himself as Chang claimed to be looking for investment projects.

Pierce said he noticed a suspicious case during a video call. In this video call, audio and video were not synchronized, which of course can be slowed down or disconnected from the Internet. But even when William Chang did not speak, his mouth was still moving in the picture. Pierce wrote:

I watched the video carefully and found out if the movie was a loop or edited. Chang's mouth moved even when he wasn't talking. In fact, his mouth was constantly moving during the call, even when we were pausing in conversation or I was talking.

So, from this strange call, he received an email that seemed to be sent from the official domain of TRON. But that wasn't the case, the scammers used an IP address from the ISP, known for providing services to various suspects, including forgery. The next step in the plan was a Skype call with Tron CEO Justin Sun. It turned out that Justin Sun's video call was actually a pre-recorded video of Tron's CEO with someone else. Pierce said:

I tried to introduce myself to Justin to see how vicious a human being is. I asked him if I would have access to these funds within 7 months. Because I am scheduled to have heart surgery after 7 months.

False identity replied:

Tokens are not locked and you have access to them. All this is stated in the contract. And I'm sorry to hear that, I hope the surgery goes well.

Fraudulent email and official domain forgery ‌ TRON Company

One user on the Discord uPlexa channel explained how to do this type of scam. He said:

Basically, scammers are looking for a large number of videos of celebrities in the field of crypto and editing it so that they can use it against victims. There is probably an advanced version that uses deepfakes (artificial intelligence image softening software). But in most cases, these images are just separate parts of the movie of meetings, events, and so on.

Although it is not clear what the ultimate goals of the fraudsters were, they are ready to deceive their victims through a lengthy process. According to media reports, celebrities continue to be the main target of crypto fraudsters. In April, British TV presenter Rylan Clark Neil said fraudsters were promoting an investment project in Bitcoin by falsifying his identity.