Elon Musk, the father of Tesla and the real-world Tony Stark, could not pass by the epidemic of cryptocurrency fraud on Twitter. One can envy Elon Musk’s ability to multitask. On one hand, he is working on a spaceship and a special life-saving capsule for kids trapped in a cave in Thailand, while on the other hand he’s got time to scroll through his Twitter feed. And of course the ongoing for months situation with cryptocurrency scams on Twitter attracted his attention. Instead of directly criticising, Musk wrote that he wants to know who is behind this activity, suggesting that its initiators will probably have "mad skills".
I want to know who is running the Etherium scambots! Mad skillz …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 8, 2018
Despite the miss-spelling, the name of the platform his tweet drew attention from the Ethereum community, thus even Vitalik Buterin himself tweeted a reply expressing his disappointment caused by the fact that Elon Musk’s first tweet was not about the technology behind the Ethereum platform but scambots. He also asked Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to help solve the problem.
I do wish @elonmusk's first tweet about ethereum was about the tech rather than the twitter scambots........@jack help us please? Or someone from the ETH community make a layer 2 scam filtering solution, please? https://t.co/biVRshZmne
— Vitalik "Not giving away ETH" Buterin (@VitalikButerin) July 9, 2018
The scale of the activity of bots led to the fact that there is now a phrase ‘Not giving away ETH’ in the usernames of many popular accounts on Twitter, however, this does not affect the activity of intruders. Twitter management has not yet taken any concrete measures to solve the problem. Users try to send information about scammers on their own, but the bots have improved and now use the Twitter vulnerability, which allows them to rename verified accounts, which makes the pseudo-distribution of cryptocurrency even more convincing.
The fraudulent scheme operated in the following way: clueless users tricked by the famous names offering “giveaways” or promising to double their earnings, they would send their funds to random Ethereum addresses. Obviously, none of the promised was true.
Note that the bot attacks on Twitter began this year. Although initially they were disguised as a small group of influential personalities from the blockchain sphere, over time they began to use the names of the most famous cryptocurrency-related projects. The verification check mark was also of no help, as the scammers took a step further and changed the names of already verified accounts to use it for the evil master plan. As such, Musk himself repeatedly "distributed" cryptocurrency along with Warren Buffett and others who probably made him draw attention to the issue.
