K-Pop Fans Become The Latest Target Of A Worldwide Crypto Scam

K-Pop fans are now the latest target of a new worldwide crypto scam involving social intelligence and media manipulation that started on Twitter as we are reading more about it in our latest crypto news.

K-Pop is a pop variant style of music played by South Korean bands and they enjoyed huge popularity in Asia but their fame is also spreading to other continents because, well, streaming services and social media.  An investigator by the Economic Times revealed that the attackers are an unidentified group that bought thousands of accounts or created a botnet to trick the K-Pop fans of the popular group BTS as the latest target, into participating in fake crypto giveaways. It all started when a Twitter user in India complained that she was following a crypto account that she didn’t realize she followed. She detected no intrusion or hack but the account shifted its focus from pop to cryptocurrencies.

The user investigated all tweets from one of the scam accounts and got BTS-related content that was embedded into the feed of over 6000 cryptocurrency-related tweets as of late. According to her, the situation was not isolated as there were several fans starting to notice similar twists. In addition to tweeting about crypto, the accounts invited the BTS fans to follow other users with similar content, claiming that they will participate in giveaways of up to $250.

The accounts started following each other and they retweeted the same content to start making engagement and blocking anyone that was leaving negative feedback. The campaign was quite strong as the scammers managed to trick the Twitter algorithm into thinking that the ARMY members were a part of the community:

“Apparently my timeline talks about the dangers of crypto accounts so often that the Twitter algorithm has decided that I’m into crypto accounts and now all of my ads are for crypto. 🤦🏼‍♀️ GO AWAY!!! pic.twitter.com/PVoWKlw4DS

— ᴮᴱLaura P⁷🐥💜 (@LPishereforBTS) February 13, 2021”

The campaigns were a part of the standard playbook that is similar to mass marketers and scammers that are looking to make money fast and the latest target this time were the k-pop fans. Ramani Ramachandran who is the CEO of Singapore-based blockchain company ZPR said that social media is full of these projects:

 “Giveaway projects are typically used as growth hacks where every retweet can fetch a 0.01% extra return, say 400 retweets in return for 100 extra coins. They take different formats such as simple meme competitions or follow-back initiatives on Twitter.”