Twitter Blocks the Elon Musk Fake Profiles as a Response to Cryptocurrency Scam Bots

July 30, 2018

3 min read

The increase in the adoption rate of cryptocurrencies has led to the invasion of the Twitter space with scam bots interested in fake giveaways of specific virtual currencies, including Ethereum (ETH).

If you are one of the crypto fans on Twitter, you definitely met this problem – crypto scam bots that pretend to give away virtual assets. Furthermore, the bots falsify profiles of several world-renowned personalities, and billionaire Elon Musk, general manager at Tesla Motors and SpaceX, is one of them. More and more copycat profiles with this name appear on Twitter, faking giveaways of significant amounts of ETH.

Twitter has considered this and found a solution. Thus, all the accounts that will utilize the Elon Musk name will be blocked, even if this is the real name of another person.

“As part of our continuing efforts to combat spam and malicious activity on our service, we’re testing new measures to challenge accounts that use terms commonly associated with spam campaigns. We are continually refining these detections based on changes in spammy activity,” a Twitter representative stated for The Verge.

Crypto members were asking Twitter to take action

The situation on Twitter has worsened so much that on 17 July several personalities in the crypto sector, counting Binance CEO, signed a petition asking the social platform to take action. They mentioned with disappointment that Twitter is struggling against crypto-related ads on the platform while letting the scam bots run uncontrolled.

“Twitter’s public stance on cryptocurrency and blockchain technologies is inconsistent and ambiguous. At a time when companies and individuals, even not-for-profits intent on educating individuals, are barred from advertising to interested participants via Twitter, it is not just hypocritical, but shameful that the company allows these spam bots and false accounts to exist and rampantly scam users, while spreading misinformation,” the letter cites.

Note that profiles will not be blocked altogether, but only as a preventive measure. Owners are asked to go through phone number verification and an “anti-bot challenge” in order to recoup their profiles.

Even so, there is a risk of further bots if scammers start to use intelligent solutions by which the name of the profile is not considered similar to the Elon Musk one. For example, a profile name that uses a character that looks just like the correct letter will avoid being blocked.