all about cryptop referances
Since Tesla’s Elon Musk tried to buy Twitter and tried to get information about the number of bots on the social media platform, Twitter bots have been infecting tens of thousands of posts day after day. In the cryptocurrency industry, bots are very widespread, and every time a popular crypto account posts, the thread is swarmed with legions of bots trying to scam people. Despite people reporting the bots regularly, and openly complaining about the problem, Twitter has done very little to address the problem.
Twitter (NYSE: TWTR ) has a problem with fake accounts, or bots, which are quite prevalent in the crypto ecosystem and other industries such as technology, finance and politics. While bots and fake accounts have been known to exist for some time, when Elon Musk tried to buy Twitter this year, his team asked for numbers regarding the amount of spam accounts exploiting the social media application. When Musk decided to end the deal with Twitter, his lawyer explained that the Tesla CEO needed more information necessary to “conduct an independent assessment of the prevalence of fake or spam accounts on Twitter’s platform.”
Musk’s lawyer added:
Sometimes Twitter has ignored Mr. Musk’s requests, sometimes it has rejected them for reasons that appear to be unjustified, and sometimes it has claimed to comply while providing Mr. Musk with incomplete or useless information.
In late August, a judge at the Delaware Court of Chancery ordered Twitter to provide Musk and his team with additional data. Furthermore, the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) also started an investigation into the spam accounts using the social media application. On Sept. 5, Musk tweeted about the new “Rings of Power” movie, and after his comment, he said, “And 90% of my comments are bots.” Musk shared a photo of spam accounts pretending to be Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, otherwise known as “CZ.”
The official Binance account on Twitter complained to the social media company in Musk’s thread, stressing: “Twitter, please, I see enough of my boss already. Can you help so I don’t have to see him 99 more times every day?” The account name “CZ Binance” is a very popular spam account name right now and a simple search will immediately produce 16 accounts impersonating “CZ Binance.” Spell CZ’s name with the term Binance in it different varieties will produce dozens of CZ bots spamming people every single day on Twitter.
Currently, the legions of CZ bots out there can spam almost any major crypto account that publishes a tweet. For example Twitter account for Bitcoin.com News has 2.6 million followers, and every time account tweets out a new article, spam accounts appear in large numbers and quite a few of them are fake CZ accounts. A large number of other fake accounts use NFT (non-fungible token) images for their profile pictures and spam comments with links, further stating: “Why is no one talking about this?” The people also have a fake account reply to the comment, to strengthen the scam. “This is a crazy guy,” says one person in response to a scam link to a YouTube video.
The same spam accounts and CZ bots can be found in tweets from almost every popular Twitter account included Coindesk, Cointelegraph, The block, Coin base, Crypto.com, Bitfinex, Blockchain.com, and more. In addition to CZ, since the start of Ethereum’s Merge hype, Twitter has been flooded with many Vitalik Buterin copy-cat Twitter bots. What’s worse is the fact that any of these accounts have blue tick verifications. Even Buterin openly ridiculed one of the prolific comments cryptobot scammers like to make in Twitter threads: “But why is everyone silent FQTP on this???” After the comment, Buterin ‘Rickrolled’ the thread with Rick Astley’s official music video “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
The reporting process on Twitter is fragmented into a myriad of sections, but it offers the ability to report an account accused of “[Spamming or] post malicious links, misuse of hashtags, fake engagement, repetitive replies, retweets or instant messages.” After checking this part of Twitter’s complaint process, the account can be accused of “posting misleading or deceptive links, leading to fraud, phishing or other malicious links”. After notifying Twitter that the account is posting misleading or deceptive links that lead to fraud, Twitter asks once more to confirm the report. “It sounds like you want to make a report for platform manipulation and spam,” Twitter’s reporting process asks.
Usually, after reporting dozens of these types of spam accounts, the bots still exist in large numbers, and often Twitter won’t respond back to the report. Once in a while, Twitter will say that it found the account to be suspected of spamming and respond to the report. Usually, Twitter simply hides the spam account from the person who reported it, and the fake account is still seen by the general public.
This past week, the popular Twitter account known as “Pomp,” run by crypto investor Anthony Pompliano, complained about the bot situation. “I have manually blocked hundreds of Twitter bots today,” Pompliano wrote on September 12. “This happens every day. How on earth can a $32 billion company not solve this problem? I have blocked over 30 bots that replied to the original tweet within the first 4 minutes. Unreal,” the crypto influencer added.
Twitter, the company’s employees, and the support team have been asked about the bot and spam account issue for quite some time. Lea Kissner, CISO of Twitter’s information security, privacy and IT team was asked about the issue on August 18. “Are you going to put together a team to deal with spam?” the person asked Kissner. “It’s out of control, [especially] in bitcoin/cryptosphere. check any bitcoins with [a] decent following.” Kissner answered the question and so: “Trust and safety and health are different layers. We work with them, but a different organization.” The person reacted to Kissner’s statement and noted:
I thought spam prevention would fall under information security. My fault then.
What do you think about the crypto spam accounts and CZ bots on Twitter? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
Image credit: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons
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