All over Twitter scam Bitcoin and Ether giveaway bots are popping up which have started to target the accounts of high-profile figures outside of the crypto community, such as SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who voiced his concern about the lack of response on the matter from Twitter.
For over a year, scam bots on Twitter have pretended to be the account owners of popular Twitter figures by copying the profile image used by big accounts to scam users out of their hard-earned money. These accounts comment on different threads on Twitter with fake Bitcoin and Ether giveaways to trick beginner crypto investors into handing over their funds.
Twitter has become unusable for many large Twitter accounts in the crypto community because scam bots plague accounts with fake giveaways, equipped with retweets and likes bought from click and troll farms.
Elon Musk seems to have had enough of the scammers and Twitter’s lack of response.
“I want to know who is running the Etherium scambots! Mad skillz …,” Musk tweeted.
Vitalik Buterin, the co-creator of Ethereum, even chimed in publicly requesting that the founder and CEO of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, provide a solution for the underlying issue. Buterin also offered to have a developer from the Ethereum community to develop a layer 2 scam filtering solution for Twitter.
“I do wish Elon Musk first tweet about Ethereum was about the tech rather than the twitter scambots…….. Jack, help us please? Or someone from the ETH community make a layer 2 scam filtering solution, please?” Buterin tweeted.
I do wish @elonmusk‘s first tweet about ethereum was about the tech rather than the twitter scambots……..@jack help us please? Or someone from the ETH community make a layer 2 scam filtering solution, please? https://t.co/biVRshZmne
— Vitalik “Not giving away ETH” Buterin (@VitalikButerin) July 9, 2018
Scam bots create threads of responses that in turn prevents crypto Twitter account users from reading the responses of legitimate users, and communicating with each other in an efficient manner.
Some experts in the crypto space have said that users who fall victim to these scam giveaways, in a way, deserve to lose their money because they have not done enough due diligence or research. However, whether users deserve or not it arguably winds up creating fewer investors. New users and casual crypto investors in the cryptosphere can easily fall for the fake giveaways, and there exists no system in place to reverse transactions sent to scammers.
In March, Cornell professor Emin Gun Sirer publicly acknowledged that scam giveaways have gotten out of hand and criticized the Twitter development team for their inability to handle it. Sirer said, Yahoo News reported.
“These scams are getting out of hand. Jack, Twitter, if you can’t detect this kind of brazen scam, what hope do you have of improving your platform?”
In response, Jack, offered a simple response: “We are on it.”
Months later, scam crypto giveaways on Twitter have worsened, polluting every section of Twitter’s feed with no sight of a solution in the near future besides “we are on it.”
Bitcoin is currently trading at [FIAT: $6,400.41] up 0.09%+ according to Coin Market Cap at the time of this report.
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