Twitter Has a Crypto Impersonator Scam Problem

No One is Giving Away Crypto on Twitter, But those Fake Accounts are a Real Problem

As we reported previously, Twitter has a problem with crypto scams. Crypto celebrities’ pages are being overwhelmed by impersonators.

UPDATE MAY 20th: Months later and this is still a major problem. If more people I realized how bad it was, Twitter would likely be in hot water on some level. Sort of absurd that, for example, a scammer can call themselves Elon Musk and have a certified account just because their @ handle isn’t @ElonMusk (or whatever). I can’t imagine how many people have lost crypto to this scam. Further, because it is crypto, there is no recourse. Not cool.

NOTE: The problem is news, my thoughts on it are opinions.

These impersonators pretend to be the celebrity and then say they are giving away X crypto if you send to Y address (or follow Z steps).

I am not implying that Twitter hasn’t tried to address this, in fact, it looks like they have as the scam has shifted from posting crypto addresses to posting links to addresses.

However, what has been done to address this has not been enough.

You don’t need machine learning to go to Charlie Lee’s Twitter and see an example of the problem. You just need a Twitter underling monitoring these pages by hand and banning accounts.

Anyone asking for crypto, everyone replying to them, and every fake account hitting the like button all need their accounts banned.

This would do a valuable service to the crypto community and Twitter. Sure, these people can create more bots, but then ban those.

Another solution would be making a list of celebrity names and then banning people from using that name if they aren’t the person (or making them fill out a form to apply to use the name).

There is more than one way to address this issue. Whatever way it is, make it sensible and quick and fix the problem yesterday.

If I sound annoyed, it is because I am.

Look at how absurd this is; the entire first part of Charlie’s comment section is scam postings. I can’t even follow the conversation on here because legitimate posts are vastly outnumbered by scam comments.

Twitter, whatever you have done to address these crypto scams, it hasn’t been enough.

These Twitter impersonation scams have made some of top crypto celebrities’ feeds impossible to enjoy.

I’m not knocking Twitter; Twitter is excellent (and, in a related point, SQ is awesome, especially on crypto). However, as much as we all love Twitter. This is a menace and has to stop.

The resources committed to the problem have not been enough. If they had been, there would be no need to write this article. We already wrote an article on this when it was news a few weeks back.

We will know the problem is fixed when Vitalik “Not giving away ETH” Buterin switches his name back to something like Vitalik “the guy who created the world’s #2 most valuable crypto by market cap” Buterin.

When the most relevant thing about a person like Vitalik on Twitter is that they aren’t giving away crypto, it goes a long way towards underlining this underlying problem.