Cryptocurrency owners are being scammed from fake Twitter accounts

After the price and popularity of cryptocurrency increases, the number of scammers who want to profit from its gullible owners also increases. Thus, from some accounts on Twitter, which are visually similar to the accounts of well-known cryptocurrency developers, they ask for small amounts with a promise to double them and return them. The time to participate in such a “promotion” is usually limited, or the “imitators” promise to double the amounts of only the first 50 or 100 applicants.

What is remarkable (and disappointing) about this story is that some of the scammers were successful in extracting cryptocurrency from its owners. According to CoinDesk, such accounts have raked in thousands of dollars in conversions over the past few days.

And, of course, some of the developers being imitated are unhappy with this trend.

Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse noted that imitators became a big problem after “@bgarlinghАus” tried to deceive his followers. 

The account has been suspended by Twitter, but cached archives from Google show that its owner offered to send 1 million XRP tokens in exchange for a much smaller amount at least twice. It is unclear whether the XRP was transferred to the user's address.

 Vitalik Buterin on Wednesday suggested that single deletions of scammer accounts are ineffective, and a system is needed to filter out all fake accounts. His dissatisfaction stems from the fact that there are more than 800 possible variations of his name, where one character is rearranged. If two characters are swapped, that number is almost 350,000.

It is unclear what efforts Twitter is making to remove these scammer accounts on a larger scale, but at least two similar accounts have already been suspended.

According to https://www.coindesk.com