We have recently become aware of a bunch of fraudulent messages in responses to our tweets. These accounts are (usually very poor) BitClave fakes, and are promoting ETH giveaways scams. Scammers and bots target high follower count users to try to reach the largest audience. Though their messages are riddled with misspellings and look very suspicious, they hope to convince people to give away their wallet information to exploit. Other messages are from “satisfied customers” to make the fakes more convincing. Please, as always, be wary online!
The most important takeaway is that we do not distribute any ETH giveaways and we will never ask you to send us anything. We are working hard to keep these fraudulent accounts off our page, but please check any account handle carefully when reading a tweet.
This is a Solvable Internet Problem
It’s strange to be impersonated, but this is a problem impacting many leaders in the crypto space. We see so many imitation accounts of the blockchain twitterati and “Not giving away ETH” markers to try to fight the scams. Vitalik, Bitfinex, Bittrex, Consensys, Binance, Joseph Lubin and more are poorly impersonated on a daily basis as scammers and bots try to empty wallets (or sell that data) of people who think they could win a bit of ETH in a giveaway.
Unfortunately, these scams give the crypto a bad name, even though all industries have similar grifters. We believe that the use of blockchain for verification will make these kinds of scams much more rare. Blockchain has a great ability to establish trust without disclosure. In the future, identities (even anonymous ones) will be verified so that you can do business, even something as small a giveaway, with the security of knowing that everyone you’re interacting with is who they say they are. Furthermore, you can do this privately, without telling the whole world who you are.
For now, we are working on tools like Desearch that make accurate, credible information about blockchain, tokens, and crypto news much easier to find. As typical platforms become hostile to the crypto community with blockchain advertising bans but don’t work to clear up scammers, we can use blockchain technology to create our own solutions.
