How Do Crypto Twitter Scammers Work? Seriously Asking

Scammers are everywhere on Twitter in cryptocurrency related profiles and tweets. There are many kinds of scams but the main one is ETH Giveaways. This is where a scammer is usually pretending to be someone famous on Twitter and promising to give away a ridiculous amount of ETH if a user sends them something first to a specific address.

I’m nowhere near as tech savvy to pretend to understand or even explain how these scam bots work. But I do have some ideas on their process.

1. Target People

Identify people who have a strong influence and reach on Crypto Twitter like @VitalikButerin, @cz_binance, @SatoshiLite.

2. Create Account

Made fake account as example

If you want a good scam you need to make sure your scammer name at first glance looks the same as the name you are trying to resemble, for fooling careless people. Like Vitalik and VitaIik. I’m sure a smart program can output a name with different letters and numbers and make it look very much like the original. Copy their profile picture to make it seem more real. Check to see if the handle is available.

Then use a site like emailfake.com to create a fake email account for account registration and confirmation. Check you are not a robot. Done. New account created.

It’s surprisingly a little too easy to create new Twitter accounts. The whole process took me couple of mins from scratch. I’m not sure how a bot can fake the reCAPTCHA portion but if it can pass that part creating (and reactivating) accounts on Twitter can be done in secs. Scaaary.

3. Start Scamming

Now start following people with big influence on Twitter. Then whenever they tweet, have a set of tweets ready to go out automatically.

Of course I did all these steps manually. A scam bot would have all these steps automated.

Some Observations & Questions for Twitter

While I was cretaing a fake account and looking up some scam tweets this fella got my attention, @nirudium. Now there are hundreds maybe thousands like it on Twitter but I think this is a good example.

Couple of Things About @nirudium

• Joined Twitter on June 2016
• First tweeted on July 12, 2018
• Trying to appear as Binance, same name, profile picture
• Been tweeting 1000+ tweets of the same content over and over for a week
• Most followers/following seem fake and joining recently

My Questions Are…

1. Why isn’t this person banned from Twitter for violation?

Posting duplicative or substantially similar content, replies, or mentions over multiple accounts you control, or creating duplicate or substantially similar accounts, with or without the use of automation, is never allowed.

2. Is this a long con? Has this account really been dormant for over 2 years? Did it delete all its any previous tweets before starting again in July?

3. How is it bypassing the reCAPTCHA system?

Hell very often when I tweet about crypto, Twitter thinks I am a bot and I have to prove over and over that I am not a robot. Twitter should be able identify fairly easily when there is this much content about someone (1000+ tweets), of the same content, that it’s a scam account, ban it and remove all previous tweets. Even that much should help Crypto Twitter a lot.

Suggestions for Twitter

New Account & Authenticty

Have some program that checks the similarities between registration email address and user name. I would imagine most real e-mail addresses have some parts of the user’s name in it. If not probably should raise some flags.

Need to make new registration not as easy.

• Make user fill up their profile, more POW :)
• Check for randomness of letters and numbers in user handle. The more random the higher the likelihood of being fake. These are scammers not even trying too hard to con.
• Check their e-mail address domain. Look out for randomly named domain and e-mail addresses. Make them use something like gmail, outlook, yahoo. Less easy to fake and bot.
• Verify in more ways than e-mail and reCAPTCHA that it’s a real user.
• Verify by other real accounts before having high volume tweeting abilities.
• Check whether or not they are following or being followed by real accounts.

I avoided stuff like banning IP addresses, I’m sure scammers are smart enough to VPN and hop around and clear any cookies, so they can’t be tracked.

Removing Scam Accounts and Tweets

If an account is tweeting the same stuff, over and over, in high volume, in very short period of time, probably should be the easiest to catch them and remove them and their tweets. Definitely understandable that not everything can be caught right away, but tackling big violators like @nirudium should be fairly easy. Still active and tweeting like a boss as of now.