FakeX - criminals hijack interest in Musk's company to defraud investors

Online fraudsters are stealing the identities of investment firms to con millions out of people wanting a slice of Elon Musk's space unicorn.

- Will Neal reports

Nuveshen Naidoo has been obsessed with space travel since he was a boy.

A sustainability consultant, he's an Elon Musk fan on both fronts. So when a friend messaged him a link for pre-IPO investments at SpaceX, he jumped.

"You might laugh, but I want to retire on Mars," he told The Observer from his home in Johannesburg.

Having completed a successful test flight last month, Musk says SpaceX will launch its first mission to the red planet next year. "It's a grand and ambitious project, and I've always tried to invest in causes I care about," Naidoo said.

The link his friend sent was for a website seemingly run by Penn Park Capital Management, a firm registered in Surrey. Describing itself as one of Europe's leading fund managers, the group behind the site was quick to get back in touch. The person who rang, calling himself Charlie Barker, spoke with a British accent, and was well versed in finance.

Naidoo invested $10,000 (£7,300) and later sold off his existing shares in Tesla to take full advantage of the SpaceX opportunity. Once all the funds were transferred, they ghosted him. "Looking around online, that's when I saw the comments," Naidoo said. "It was all a total scam."

With his status as the world's richest man, a maverick tech innovator and Maga's edgelord supreme, Musk is an irresistible lure for some would-be investors. SpaceX is thought to be worth about $400bn but, as a private company, its shares are almost impossible to get hold of.

So-called "tokenised stocks" have grown in popularity in tandem with the vast expansion of private capital markets. According to professional services company EY, assets under management in global private markets more than doubled over the past decade, reaching about $24tn by the end of 2023, while the investable global public market portfolio has grown at an annualised rate of about 5.7% a year over the same period.