Elon Musk Twitter Cryptocurrency giveaway Scam: Twitter Scambots strike again

Giveaways are always welcome. Especially if they come from very rich people like Elon Musk, known to help the poor and have incredible futuristic ideas. There is an old saying however:

“If something seems too good to be true, it usually is”

Twitter scambots are not something entirely new and we’ve wrote about them recently. Ironically enough, Elon Musk had a lot to say about them in the past and this time he ended up being impersonated. A verified twitter mark was also present in the account, which gave the compelling offer to return 1 to 100 BTC for every 0.2 to 5 BTC the users send.

Coinstaker strongly urges our viewers to NEVER click any links from twitter accounts impersonating other people. Always double or triple check accounts, especially when you are going to “donate” cryptocurrency . Naturally, this triggered a lightning response and outcry from many users. Twitter’s anti-scam practices were already being questioned and this further deteriorates the trust in the social media.

Elon Musk giving away crypto. We’ve seen this before

Usually, scams like this go unnoticed even if they do possess the verified mark. There are already numerous cases of users easily acquiring the so called mark. What drove many people to question the social media was that the scam was circulating via a promoted tweet. A promoted tweet is essentially a tweet, which is paid for by advertising companies or the issuer of the tweet. This is done to reach a wider audience through twitter’s network of followers.

In this case, the scam artists are taking advantage of the recent spike in interest towards Elon Musk and Tesla in general. Now this is nowhere near the first time Tesla’s CEO, Elon Musk has been impersonated on twitter. His popularity has been used a few times in order to “giveaway” cryptocurrencies. This has resulted in twitter facing long and harsh criticism for their lack of immediate action towards scambots.

Earlier this year a stunning discovery was made by two researchers. They used a machine learning model to go through nearly 90 million tweets to search for scambots. Their findings were way worse than what many expected, as they discovered a very sophisticated botnet perpetuating a crypto scam.

Elon Musk has made the public know that he’s aware of the issue and he even sought help from the crypto community. Scambots will be a problem, which can have devastating consequences, if twitter doesn’t take immediate action. Read below, if you want to learn the magnitude of influence scambots have.

Read more:

• The first Crypto Bank will open in Switzerland in 2019
• Twitter Scambots: A rising threat to the crypto community and social media
• Crypto Hedge funds is something we will here more often