What's worse is when a "verified" user gets their account pwned. The fraudsters set their display name to match another verified account and copy their avatar. It's hard to spot in the crowd of a twitter feed. https://twitter.com/SwiftOnSecurity/status/99294298727663616... Well, it would be if the messages themselves weren't so dumb.
- Famous twitter personality A posts something.
- (Usually) the first reply to their tweet is a bot with the exact same avatar BUT a slightly misspelled name of personality A offering 1000 ethereum in exchange for .10 ETH or what have you.
- There are people gullible enough to send them ETH/any other crypto
- Profit
Back when they were super prevalent on Elon Musk's tweets, I'd look up the wallets and sure enough people were dumb enough to send it coins.
What gets me is the stupidly obvious fake replies saying it works.
Honestly the best solution is to open verification to everyone, not just notable people, anyone that actually wants to hand over their ID and prove they are who they say they are and let us filter out non verified users. If they don't want verification to look like an endorsement, that's what they need to do. Otherwise it is an endorsement.
I have a (dumb) friend who fell for this. It was a good scam - the eth scambot used the same profile photo and had a very similar @ username to elon's (minus the "Verified" icon of course), and it looked like "real" people were replying with affirmations.
https://twitter.com/BitMEXdotcom/status/997099326714335234
The first post is from an official exchange. The rest isn’t. Take careful note of the usernames and like counts