Free Ethereum spam bots are ravaging Twitter | Hacker News Reader

Free Ethereum spam bots are ravaging Twitter

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76 pointsteslacar34 comments

Agreed, it's getting absurd. Practically every post from an official cryptocurrency team's Twitter account gets numerous replies from an account designed to look just like the official account.

Typically, they post a poster stating that there is an Ethereum giveaway, and to enter: one simply needs to give a small amount of Ethereum to the wallet address in the poster. This is supposedly to have the wallet address made known to the "staff" and in turn: the user will receive several times more Ethereum back.

It's clearly still roping in people and is highly prevelant. I'm shocked that Twitter's staff hasn't taken much evasive action. These spam/scam accounts keep springing up left, and right with no end in sight.

What's even more absurd is how much funds in ETH are there in these accounts.

For instance I saw one scam post advertise this address a day or two ago, https://etherscan.io/address/0x7DB9656FC8435F765DF5748E32Bf3...

~15k USD worth funds scammed out of people. Not entirely sure if I find this funny or depressing.

Some of these scammers are using other wallets they own to send money to themselves to make it appear more "legit" to unsuspecting people. It's pretty terrible that as soon as a scam wallet is identified, another one just pops right up.

This is why Vitalik changed his name to "Vitaliak "Not Giving Away ETH" Buterin".

I'm ashamed to admit the first one of these I saw ('Musk' celebrating a launch last year) I was totally credulous of and forwarded it on to a couple of ETH-owning friends who quickly put me in my place (..and subsequently disavowed friendship :)..). I spent the next 24 hours on ETH-tracking sites watching as these bastards raked in nearly $80,000, from that one scam alone.

In my defence, I don't use Twitter much, and I mistook the value of ETH 'Musk' was asking for at around $20 rather than $200+ - had it been my own money, I would've been far more eagle-eyed and cautious.

Still, I was amazed/horrified at the gall and success of these people.

I never cease to be surprised at how unremorsefully sociopathic some people can be when it comes to getting their hands on other people's money.

Sure they may get away with it.

But the curse is that even if no one catches them: They'll always know that they did it.

Karma will take its toll.

It is actually quite sophisticated, the wallets I looked at even simulated the transactions that are sent back with 10* the original amount (to other wallets owned by the scammers).

When I see one of these I often report it (just one more finger in the dike) -- but Twitter's report options only include "spam" and "abusive/harmful"; I'm not sure what's the closest option for fraud and impersonation.

Unfortunately the twitter report options are a tree, so it's hard to find the right thing. I believe under abuse there's an "impersonation" option, I've used it before.

Oh thanks, I’ll look for that next time. Of course there’ll be a next time.

You know there's a problem when any prominent crypto figure has to put "not giving away free Eth" in their twitter name to help combat the spam.

This even happens with verified accounts. Fun fact: we got banned after reporting with no human support to help us. We suspect the spammers targeted our account with multiple false reports https://hackernoon.com/apc-nigerias-verified-twitter-account...

The simplest solution would be to hire 2 interns familiar with crypto twitter to sit down and manually ban the fake replies full-time for a couple of months. Would that really be so costly/difficult?

It would be if that was Twitter's response to every spam bot problem on the whole of Twitter yes.

Is it in Twitter's (financial) interest that to remove the spam or keep it going? I'm honestly asking.

More bots more growth!

People flaming, complaining, arguing with shills about scams just look like sweet, sweet engagement to algorithms!

A fool and their money are easily parted

Every post by a prominent figure such as Elon Musk, Pavel Durov and many others are immediately spammed to hell by copycat accounts pushing these scams. I've spent a good amount of time reporting them to no avail. Twitter just doesn't care.

Even worse, I have seen a user get the verification as "John Doe", then he could change his name to Elon Musk, keeping the verification badge.

Twitter has a long way to go.

Sorry, it's not clear to me, what exactly is the con that these bots are running?

You can find an example here

https://twitter.com/BitMEXdotcom/status/997099326714335234

The first post is from an official exchange. The rest isn’t. Take careful note of the usernames and like counts

What's worse is when a "verified" user gets their account pwned. The fraudsters set their display name to match another verified account and copy their avatar. It's hard to spot in the crowd of a twitter feed. https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/99294298727663616... Well, it would be if the messages themselves weren't so dumb.

- Famous twitter personality A posts something. - (Usually) the first reply to their tweet is a bot with the exact same avatar BUT a slightly misspelled name of personality A offering 1000 ethereum in exchange for .10 ETH or what have you. - There are people gullible enough to send them ETH/any other crypto - Profit

Back when they were super prevalent on Elon Musk's tweets, I'd look up the wallets and sure enough people were dumb enough to send it coins.

What gets me is the stupidly obvious fake replies saying it works.

Honestly the best solution is to open verification to everyone, not just notable people, anyone that actually wants to hand over their ID and prove they are who they say they are and let us filter out non verified users. If they don't want verification to look like an endorsement, that's what they need to do. Otherwise it is an endorsement.

I have a (dumb) friend who fell for this. It was a good scam - the eth scambot used the same profile photo and had a very similar @ username to elon's (minus the "Verified" icon of course), and it looked like "real" people were replying with affirmations.

Larger points notwithstanding, verification is not suspended, for eg https://twitter.com/emma4change joined after Aug 2017 and is verified.

Explain to me as someone not into cryptocurrencies, why ethereum specifically?

bitcoin's too expensive to ask for money like this. Also old timers won't fall for this scam. the next most popular is ethereum.

Also the ethereum ICO get-rich-quick “investors” are easy marks.

It's not just Ethereum. I have seen this scam aimed at DGB and MAID folks as well, and those are just two that I pay attention to, so there are doubtless many more.

I'm not sure, but I suspect it's because it has the most liquidity (trading pairs, trading volume) after bitcoin, and much lower transaction fees.

Another factor could be that lot of people already have Ethereum accounts, and ETH, given it is the most widely used cryptocurrency by daily transaction count. Many people have an Ethereum wallet just to be able to buy and hold ERC20 tokens.

Wouldn’t this be super easy to filter out with some kind of ML scheme?

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