One of the most maddening things about lookalike Twitter scammers has been Twitter’s unwillingness to do anything about them. It’s not a complex problem to solve, and yet for months the micro-blogging service has prevaricated while the gullible public has given their ether away to flagrant scammers. A couple of third party services have now sprung up promising to solve the problem. If Twitter can’t stop crypto scammers, they will.
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Developers Are Taking Matters Into Their Own Hands
Crypto scams have been plaguing Twitter all year. They usually involve the scammer mimicking the account of a crypto influencer and then replying to their tweets promising free ETH for anyone who sends a small amount initially. Why any benefactor should require cryptocurrency in order to send out more cryptocurrency to the donor is a mystery, but the nonsensical nature of the scam hasn’t prevented naive Twitter users from being defrauded of cryptocurrency.
Metacert Protocol and Scam Clerk are two recently launched services that promise to weed out scammers and make Twitter a better place for everyone. The former of these two solutions – Metacert – is a general anti-fraud project that’s making the leap to blockchain. Its Twitter scammer software is still in beta, but appears to be effective at warning the followers of a high profile account that the reply they’re viewing is that of a copycat and not the original poster. The tool then blocks the scam account. Metacert’s Cryptonite tool (not to be confused with the hashing algorithm of the same name) also alerts crypto holders to phishing websites via a green shield symbol that appears in the toolbar.
Scam Clerk Goes to Town on Twitter Impersonators
Scam Clerk, another new tool to have launched, bills itself as being “like a virus scan for Twitter”. It features a dashboard that reveals how many impersonators it has blocked, and retains a SCUM (Scam Clerk Universal Master) list of all Twitter scammers, not just impersonators. Thanks to the likes of Scam Clerk and the developing Metacert Protocol, clamping down on Twitter scammers is getting easier. In truth though, it shouldn’t fall to third party developers to conceive such solutions: this ought to be the job of Twitter, as it’s the reputation of their service that scammers are ruining.
For all his bullishness on bitcoin, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has been slow to act on crypto scammers. Even those who believe that scam victims deserve everything they get would agree that scammers spoil the discourse on crypto Twitter. Due to the prevalence of impostor accounts, which fill the replies to tweets with their incessant spam, Twitter is no longer suited to cryptocurrency discourse. If the bear market can’t kill off Twitter’s crypto scammers, perhaps third party solutions can.
Why do you think Twitter hasn’t bothered to stamp out scammers? Let us know in the comments section below.
Images courtesy of Shutterstock, and Twitter.
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