A couple of days ago cryptocurrency influencer John McAfee posted this on Twitter:
I was pretty happy to see this post since it is high time influencers like John spoke out against the abuse of the Twitter platform by cryptocurrency scammers. However, my eye caught this reply to John's tweet which came from the verified account of Justin Sun, founder of TRON:
After spending a lot of time in the cryptocurrency market, my senses usually tune out any account which promise free giveaways. However, this tweet came from a verified account and I was forced to take a second look at it. I checked out the account profile and I realised that something was amiss with this account. The verified account tag, though, still remained a mystery to me.
Jump ahead a few hours, and John confirmed my worst fears with this tweet:
The account, even though verified, turned out to be a fake account. But how did that happen in the first place? Did someone sell a fake account? How can we have two verified accounts in the same name? Lots of questions unanswered...
Specifically, there are three annoying things that I see almost every day on Twitter:
I. Annoying impersonated accounts who reply to the official tweets promising free ETH or BTC, in exchange for a small fraction of the same cryptocurrency. Of course, they look pretty legit copying the profile images and bio.
II. Idiotic fake accounts which reply to the impersonated accounts mentioned above claiming that they received their free ETH or other tokens. These scam teams even like and retweet these posts to make it look legit.
III. Annoying scammy posts with referral links (Binance referral links seem to be the most popular) which clog the Twitter timelines.
Where are you Twitter?
Many cryptocurrency influencers have time and again cited this problem, but Twitter hasn't taken any serious action. I would like to believe that Twitter would certainly be able to do something about it. I am no tech expert, but isn't there a way to use algorithms to detect this kind of behaviour and ban it? Can we have some sort of an entry barrier for scammers so that it isn't that easy to start posting scammy messages with accounts that are just hours old? And surely, the social media platform can take action against duplicate influencer accounts.
Mind you, I am a huge fan of Twitter (been tweeting for almost 9 years from my personal account) and I use it everyday to make some sense of this chaotic world of cryptocurrencies. However, these scammy tweets are spoiling the Twitter experience for its loyal users. If this continues, I dare say that users may flock to other platforms like Telegram for more focused conversations around cryptocurrencies. I am not implying that Telegram is perfect, but it can be argued that it has slightly better security features (debatable maybe!)
Till Twitter decides to clean its house, what's the way out? I suggest three things to start with:
- All influencers and major cryptocurrency projects should stop giving free airdrops and giveaways.
- Influencers and cryptocurrency project accounts should keep tweeting that they do not give free giveaways to re-enforce the message. Some like Charlie Lee and Lisk HQ are already doing it.
- Sites like Coinmarketcap, Cointelegraph, Binance and other trusted resources should do more investor awareness programs.
These things are happening because innocent, unaware investors are obviously falling for it. My heart goes out to those people who lost money to such scams. Hopefully, other investors and newbies can learn from this and be more vigilant about free giveaways. If you are a newbie investor, please remember that there are no free lunches. Stay away from anything 'free'. The golden mantra - If it's too good to be true, it probably is!!
Do you have ideas on how to tackle this menace? Please feel free to drop a comment!