Stop Unfollowing Ethereum Scam Bots, Twitter Actually Wants You To Follow Them Instead

Twitter hate cryptocurrency don’t they. It’s no surprise, it seems that Twitter is a hub for cryptocurrency scams. Though advertising is banned, it’s still very easy for people to set up fake pages for ICO’s/crypto events and even easier for people to run multiple Twitter bots for this purpose too. Overall, it’s very easy to scam via Twitter, and it’s very easy to be scammed too. One typical scam, is the ‘Ethereum Giveaway’ during which bots and fake accounts charade as celebrities that are giving away Ethereum. Within this, users are asked to giveaway personal data/crypto assets in return for a bigger payout, naturally though, those that follow suit don’t receive any Ethereum in return, suprise suprise. This is why many celebrities, especially in the crypto world, will include ‘NOT GIVING AWAY ETHEREUM’ in their bio’s. Elon Musk, the mind behind Tesla is one celebrity at the fore of these scams. His name is used on a regular basis, so much so that Twitter have recently banned the name (other than for Musk himself, and anyone else who can verify that Elon Musk is actually their name). The general advice, is to avoid these bots and only follow verified accounts. Eventually, Twitter does catch up with bots and fake accounts in order to remove them, but in many instances, they are usually too late. Well, this was the advice, until Twitter suddenly started recommending scam Twitter accounts instead… According to The Next Web: “The social media giant was caught recommending a suspicious account impersonating Tesla CEO Elon Musk, as spotted by security researcher Troy Mursch. The fake account even bears his name, something that was meant to be stamped out weeks ago. The more concerning part is that Twitter’s scambot recommendation is not an isolated incident. The algorithm seems to be promoting blatant scam accounts to its users.” Moreover: “We have since been able to confirm some of the recommended accounts were distributing links to fake Ethereum and Bitcoin giveaways – sometimes disguised as official initiatives by legitimate companies. Among others, the list of impersonated companies includes Coinbase, TRON, Binance, Tesla, and SpaceX.” See the full article for yourself, here.   From this image, we can clearly see Twitter’s algorithms recommending a number of fake Elon Musk accounts- Image sourced from - The Next Web It’s an epidemic Okay, joking aside, Twitter aren’t actually seriously suggesting you should follow scambots, this is obviously down to some sort of internal error which is spitting out false recommendations. Perhaps though, this is actually as a result of the sheer volume of fake accounts, there are so many out there, maybe it’s actually quite difficult for Twitters algorithms to avoid fake accounts? Our advice Don’t follow fake accounts, only follow those that are verified. If it’s not verified, check the accounts name/Twitter handle and look out for spelling errors and strange tweets/content. Just be careful. Don’t partake in anything on Twitter that seems to good to be true and be wary. This way, at the very least, you’re minimising the risk you’re exposing yourself to by using Twitter as a part of your crypto research portfolio.