Crypto scams on Twitter have existed for years – but there are still enough users who fall for it. And according to a recent report from security publication BleepingComputer, the scams are hugely lucrative.
The scams are cheap but successful
A popular and successful scam: the fraudsters pretend to be a famous personality – such as Tesla boss Elon Musk or Amazon boss Jeff Bezos. Then they advertise on Twitter to give away a certain cryptocurrency.
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In order to get it, according to the fraudsters, you have to make an advance payment – and send coins yourself. Usually along the lines of “send me 1 bitcoin and I’ll send you 2 back”. If you do that, you are of course only rid of your coins. Nothing ever comes back.
Send multi-billionaires coins? This obviously sounds like fraud, but it is still enormously successful because the rip-offs usually proceed cleverly and, for example, copy the Twitter profile of the respective celebrity almost 1: 1.
In 2018, for example, scammers were able to take in $ 180,000 in a single day with the Elon Musk Giveaway scam. And it doesn’t look any better in 2021 either – on the contrary.
The security researchers of “MalwareHunterTeam” report that more and more verified Twitter accounts are hacked and then used for a corresponding fraud.
These accounts respond to tweets from celebrities and advertise the respective scam in which the celebrity involved in the dialogue allegedly gives away free cryptocurrency.
In total, bitcoins worth more than 580,000 dollars were looted in this way. Ethereum is often the subject of these scams, but at $ 2,700 it is way behind BTC in terms of “transaction volume”.
Most often, the fraudsters pretend to be Tesla CEO Elon Musk or interact with him from hacked accounts. Probably because the entrepreneur is very present on Twitter and has also commented on crypto topics several times.
The scammers were even smart enough to create custom wallet addresses that had “Musk” in the address. If you want to take a look yourself, here is it Address on the blockchain.
However, other celebrities, influencers and accounts with numerous followers are also regularly confronted with these crypto scams. Twitter announced last year that it wanted to fight the scams with “new security measures”. So far, apparently unsuccessful.
Last update: Sunday 17th January 2021
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