I’m sick and tired of having to delete botnets on Twitter!

After months of hassle by a Twitter botnet that replied to each of my updates with a cryptocurrency scam, I decided to spend a Saturday morning investigating the structure and functioning of botnets with a view to assessing how many of them there might be out there.

In short, I was staggered: creating an account on Twitter is so easy that fake accounts are everywhere. In addition to being sold to wannabe influencers, politicians or anybody who wants to give the impression they are more popular than they really are, they are also used by scammers.

Botnets work by finding someone with a reasonable number of followers and develop a program that responds to each of their updates with a reply promoting the scam in question, usually with a link back to a Telegram group, a YouTube video, etc. The generated reply automatically receives one or more Likes from other fake accounts in an attempt to get those updates to the character’s timeline, and therefore, to their followers. The idea is to make followers of that person believe there is some kind of relationship with the content of the link, which is often a very crude attempt to separate the unwary from their money.

Do these scams work? I don’t know, but I imagine that given the widespread ignorance of issues like cryptocurrencies and how gullible so…