WHAT ARE BITCOIN SCAMS AND HOW DID TWITTER BECOME A HAVEN FOR THEM

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On 15th of July, Twitter suffered what cyber crime experts have labelled "The biggest security breach in its history." but it is just the latest in a years-long campaign by criminals to scam people on the platform through the ruse of bitcoin giveaways.

Among those targeted in Wednesday's attack was billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, who has consistently raised concerns about the "dire problem" of cryptocurrency scams.

Typically, the scams involve fake accounts posing as high-profile Twitter users like Musk in order to hold giveaways. They request Twitter users send cryptocurrency to a digital address in order to receive a greater amount in return.

Once the money is sent, it is nearly impossible for the victims to recover their funds due to the semi-anonymous nature of bitcoin making it difficult to trace the perpetrators.

Analysis by The Independent in 2018 uncovered hundreds of transactions sent to cryptocurrency scammers operating on Twitter, resulting in thousands of dollars worth of losses for victims.

Twitter said at the time that it was cracking down on cryptocurrency scams, claiming it had developed new tools to detect "spammy and malicious" activity.

But scammers continued to proliferate on the platform, changing their username and profile pictures to match those of high-profile accounts in order to trick people.

The site's rules state that impersonating another individual for the purpose of deceiving its users is a violation of its terms of service, and will result in an account being suspended. Simply suspending an account does not solve the problem, as it is a relatively quick and simple process to set up a new account.

Following a spate of impersonations of his account earlier this year, Mr Musk tweeted: "The crypto scam level on Twitter is reaching new levels. This is not cool."

The latest attack was another level still, as rather than simply impersonate Musk and other major accounts, the scammers were actually able to hijack their accounts.

A bitcoin address used in the attacks received more than 350 payments, which totalled around £95,000, before Twitter took action to take the posts down and return the accounts to their owners.

Twitter described the attack as a "coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools."

In a series of tweets the social media giant stated that there are "diagnosing and will share everything we can when we have a more complete understanding of exactly what happened."


Credit to  INDEPENDENT





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