Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto

by joegaebel on 10/14/2020, 12:44:28 PM with 91 comments

  • by jwcrux on 10/14/2020, 2:10:57 PM

    This is a scam that has been going on for years that has adapted its techniques over time.

    We used this botnet as a case study back in 2018 when doing analysis on finding Twitter bots at a large scale. You can find the paper here [0] - the cryptocurrency scam botnet starts on page 28. You can also find the talk here [1] where we go into a little more detail. In full irony, someone tried sharing our research on Twitter, and one of the bots replied to the thread trying to spread the scam.

    [0] https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots....

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQsRg0VsYoo

  • by pg_bot on 10/14/2020, 2:14:37 PM

    This has been going on for quite some time, and I would be embarrassed if I were a part of Twitter's engineering team.

    From a technical standpoint these types of scam tweets should be easily identified as spam and the fact that they aren't is damning.

  • by coldpie on 10/14/2020, 1:53:52 PM

    So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.

  • by fortran77 on 10/14/2020, 5:52:52 PM

    Why are "crypto" people so willing to believe that "Elon Musk" is offering to double their money?

  • by smsm42 on 10/14/2020, 6:27:07 PM

    So the new thing is that hacking bluecheck account basically gets official Twitter stamp of approval on anything on that twitter account. And since display name and bio can be easily changed, basically the only think bluecheck is confirming is that the handle at one time belonged to a real person. And if somebody chooses a "witty" handle which does not identify the person clearly, you won't even know which one.

  • by vmception on 10/15/2020, 1:48:36 AM

    Welcome to 2 years ago.

    Can someone help me here, how do these alarmist articles pop up occassionally as if this hasn't been happening for years.

    Why does my twitter experience, logged out, consistently show me the fake crypto scams as the first response to any public figure, with heavy activity and evolving responses, while others get to act like they've never seen this before and must warn everyone.

    Any theories?

    One theory I have is that most people actually falling for these don't talk about it. Similar to most scams, people just feel too dumb.

  • by benvineyard on 10/14/2020, 11:29:51 PM

    I'm seeing an increase in Youtube scams as well where 5k bitcoins are "given away". The video and content look very legit and casual content browsers are easily susceptible.

  • by 1MachineElf on 10/15/2020, 1:17:03 AM

    I didn't realize this was still going on. Saw one of these posts in like 2017 under the handle @elonmvsk. Sad it's still happening.

  • by sat_nam on 10/14/2020, 6:35:51 PM

    I observed something similar that began earlier this year. I wrote about it on the Tenable blog. They impersonate many of the people following Trump and engaging with his tweets, irrespective of party affiliation.

    https://www.tenable.com/blog/cryptocurrency-scams-fake-givea...