Nowadays, it is essential to stay in line with all the happenings if you are a crypto investor, trader or just someone with a couple of hundreds in a wallet. Wondering why?
Well, it appears that the scammers are getting more and more sophisticated with their tricks month by month. Currently, they are using Twitter to get closer to crypto investors – through a tactic that uses verified accounts (by the social network itself).
“How is this even possible?” – many are asking themselves.
Well, it all started last week when the Tron Foundation founder Justin Sun had his profile re-created. Apparently, the fake profile created by hackers named @TronFoundationI, copied the real Tron Foundation Twitter content and duplicated the pinned tweets.
The planned scam was a link to a cryptocurrency wallet posted by the (fake) Tron Foundation profile – requesting for donations and promising to send 4 to 10 ether back to the first 200 users that will “contribute”. This smart move appears to be an escalation of previous attempts to defraud many Twitter users where the scammers would only create fraudulent accounts and copy developers or other well-known people in the cryptocurrency space.
Twitter’s rules clearly mandate that the accounts lose their verified status as soon as they change their names. This way, several fraudulent accounts have managed to maintain their verification badges which are known by the “blue tick” mark next to the account’s name.
As a spokesperson for the company said, “If an account changes its username, it should lose its verified status. Any instance of this not occurring is an error.”
Even the founder of Twitter Jack Dorsey commented on the situation.
How many verified users change their usernames each day?
How many verified users change their usernames, real name, profile photo, *and* header photo every day?
Probably a small enough number that it wouldn’t bee too onerous for Twitter to inspect all of them! https://www.t.co/dx9klP8lCv
— Gabe Rivera (@gaberivera) February 26, 2018
So, beware of profiles that don’t have the blue tick – even though they may appear original – and beware of any actions that will lead you to sending coins to someone inspired by a post on a social network.
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