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If you follow any billionaires and read their comments they are full of crypto scams. Things like @elommusk replying to @elonmusk saying "to celebrate this awe

If you follow any billionaires and read their comments they are full of crypto scams. Things like @elommusk replying to @elonmusk saying "to celebrate this awesome news I'm going to hand out some free bitcoins!, just send 0.1BTC to <address> and i'll return 1BTC!" then 100 replies from other accounts saying "thanks Elon, you're the greatest!"

jeffwass 9y ago
Do people actually fall for this? I thought this is the whole reason to use the blue check mark, so you can immediately tell real Elon from bot Elon. But there are weird celebrity bots too. Eg, I followed Adam Sandler, and within a few hours a couple Adam Sandler bots started following me. They just had retweets of Adam Sandler tweets, but also a few hundred followers. Makes me wonders who are the people that follow these back, maybe just other bots?
- branchless 9y ago
  Whenever anyone follows me on Twitter I check their account. If it's not someone genuine i block them. Wouldn't work for someone famous but for a normal person it's worth it.
always_good 9y ago
And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed. Not as lucrative as it seemed to be the first time I noticed them a month ago where a Coinbase tweet had a spam response with an address that made 80k USD in <1 hour, but it's still clearly lucrative. This is going to force Twitter to finally do something about all the bots since they'll have to deploy countermeasures that generalize across pretty much all bots. It's clear that Twitter has held a Laissez-faire or blind-eye philosophy towards bots, but it's hard to keep procrastinating once you can trivially verify that your platform is a lucrative tool for scammers. Not to mention, the top N responses to every high profile tweet are now these scammers and it makes their platform look absolutely uncontrolled.
- 21 9y ago
  > And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed. Just like the fake "Thanks!" replies, I'm sure there are fake actual transactions, meaning the scammer sends bitcoin to itself to make it look legit. The fact that they pay transactions fees doesn't really change much. So it's very hard to know how much of those thousands of dollars were actually scammed.
  - russdill 9y ago
    They don't bother, it's not worth trying to target people who actually check things. The scam tweet usually links to what amounts to a phishing page for crypto transaction tracking sites. It looks very real.
  - TangoTrotFox 9y ago
    The sort of person that would check transaction histories is not the sort of person that's going to believe, even for a second, that "@e10nmussk" asking for people to send them money is genuine. I would expect all those transactions are genuine. There's a lot of naive people in this world and they seem attracted to Twitter like flies to a light.

jeffwass 9y ago

Do people actually fall for this? I thought this is the whole reason to use the blue check mark, so you can immediately tell real Elon from bot Elon. But there are weird celebrity bots too. Eg, I followed Adam Sandler, and within a few hours a couple Adam Sandler bots started following me. They just had retweets of Adam Sandler tweets, but also a few hundred followers. Makes me wonders who are the people that follow these back, maybe just other bots?

branchless 9y ago
Whenever anyone follows me on Twitter I check their account. If it's not someone genuine i block them. Wouldn't work for someone famous but for a normal person it's worth it.

always_good 9y ago

And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed. Not as lucrative as it seemed to be the first time I noticed them a month ago where a Coinbase tweet had a spam response with an address that made 80k USD in <1 hour, but it's still clearly lucrative. This is going to force Twitter to finally do something about all the bots since they'll have to deploy countermeasures that generalize across pretty much all bots. It's clear that Twitter has held a Laissez-faire or blind-eye philosophy towards bots, but it's hard to keep procrastinating once you can trivially verify that your platform is a lucrative tool for scammers. Not to mention, the top N responses to every high profile tweet are now these scammers and it makes their platform look absolutely uncontrolled.

21 9y ago
> And if you check the address, you can often see thousands of dollars scammed. Just like the fake "Thanks!" replies, I'm sure there are fake actual transactions, meaning the scammer sends bitcoin to itself to make it look legit. The fact that they pay transactions fees doesn't really change much. So it's very hard to know how much of those thousands of dollars were actually scammed.
- russdill 9y ago
  They don't bother, it's not worth trying to target people who actually check things. The scam tweet usually links to what amounts to a phishing page for crypto transaction tracking sites. It looks very real.
- TangoTrotFox 9y ago
  The sort of person that would check transaction histories is not the sort of person that's going to believe, even for a second, that "@e10nmussk" asking for people to send them money is genuine. I would expect all those transactions are genuine. There's a lot of naive people in this world and they seem attracted to Twitter like flies to a light.