Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
medium.comThis is a scam that has been going on for years that has adapted its techniques over time.
We used this botnet as a case study back in 2018 when doing analysis on finding Twitter bots at a large scale. You can find the paper here [0] - the cryptocurrency scam botnet starts on page 28. You can also find the talk here [1] where we go into a little more detail. In full irony, someone tried sharing our research on Twitter, and one of the bots replied to the thread trying to spread the scam.
[0] https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots....
It's very disappointing that Twitter has allowed this to go on for so long. The scam is so successful that it is now attached to pretty much every prominent tweet and drowns out actual replies.
All it really takes to solve this is better UI. This is costing some users money and making the experience worse for everyone. Sad that Twitter isn't willing to take this seriously.
Maybe Jack is running the scam as a hobby and doesnt want to kill nice side hobby to stack sats.
This has been going on for quite some time, and I would be embarrassed if I were a part of Twitter's engineering team.
From a technical standpoint these types of scam tweets should be easily identified as spam and the fact that they aren't is damning.
It's not just Twitter. Fake SpaceX "live" streams with a couple thousand viewers regularly pop-up in my YouTube recommendations. They're peddling the same kind of crypto scams.
What they typically do is takeover an existing YouTube channel, rename/brand it so it shows up in all of the people who subscribed to the channels feeds.
It’s even more maddening that there is no way to report that a YouTube channel has been compromised, there are only report options for inappropriate content of various sorts.
So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.
> cryptocurrency is dead, right?
No, not quite. Total new investment into the space is falling. But it’s nowhere close to zero.
It will probably never totally die. Instead, like baseball cards or beanie babies, it will atrophy into obscurity.
There are enough people who have sunk enough into the project—financially, reputationally—that, barring a depression, it will continue to have backers for at least another few decades. As long as Tether doesn’t overplay its hand, prices should keep the illusion going. It’s a cautionary tale regarding the staying power of purposeless institutions.
You're implying that there are zero use cases for public cryptocurrencies other than as collectibles. This couldn't be further from the truth. There's a thriving decentralized finance ecosystem on Ethereum with more than 10B in value locked away. DeFi is an application that's only made possible because of the existence of an open public smart contract protocol. You're being very disingenuous.
The cryptocurrency space is quite alive, and is thriving. As much as people like to hate on it, the whole space rife with engineering, social, and economic challenges that attract geeks. Unfortunately, it attracts a lot of scammers too.
The space is thriving in that people are working on it, but I wouldn't say it is thriving in terms of non-crypto people actually using these products.
It's a pretty self-contained bubble of geeks building things for other geeks. Which isn't not interesting! But the expectations set by the cryptonauts was that this was all going to change the world.
And then ran face first into the reasons the existing systems work the way that they do, haven't communicated well to "average" people, can't tell a non-theoretical/ideological story of why what they build exists, etc.
There are some great people working on crypto projects, but I wouldn't say it is thriving. The only mainstream company is Coinbase and they make money based on trading, not any underlying tangible value of the coins.
> But the expectations set by the cryptonauts was that this was all going to change the world.
So what?
"omg this ycombinator founder didn't change the world" said nobody ever
But mention crypto one time.... I guess it is nice that it is held up to a separate higher standard and captivates the minds of some people willing to help it get there.
Some people here mentioned a standard about merchant adoption, even to that, so what? thats the least interesting use case, the M0 money supply is small in exchange systems people choose to respect, its panned out the same way in crypto but people decide to make a separate standard of "hey a lot of this is used for speculation! I don't consider that a use case, is it because I'm ignorant of how fiat currencies work, no, can't be".
There are various services for merchants that shield the merchant from knowing crypto is being used, and various services for consumers (like debit cards) that shield them from needing to directly use crypto. That exists, not a lot of fanfare is needed, if you want to use that you can and don't need to write a whole blog post about it. Its not an interesting use case, no matter how much you felt you needed to quantify its use in that way in order to feel better about it.
It also works, shrug, onchain (+tx eventually settled onchain) transaction volume is at all time highs and it doesn't even make international news because its not news, as it should be.
Sounds like magic the gathering card econ. Which is super fun! But personally, I definitely don't consider specing into Embercleave a meaningful societal mover
Funny detail: Magic the gathering hits very close to home by accident.
One of the (back then) dominating bitcoin exchanges used the domain mtgox.com which was an acronym for "magic the gathering online exchange".
Yeah, it was previously a Magic The Gathering exchange, and then converted to a Bitcoin exchange.
They learned the hard way you need a higher standard of engineering for a financial exchange.
Wasn’t it an inside job? Or Arles the heavily speculated?
Nobody knows for sure, but the postmortem suggests that it might have been straight up incompetence. However, it's certainly possible to consider that the "incompetence" was on purpose to hide the fact that he was stealing from the company.
"defi" is an interesting concept that gained a lot of traction over the summer. Over $10 billion in crypto assets has been deposited in various protocols such as Aave which is like a decentralised bank operating on ethereum.
Sounds like magic the gathering card econ.
Does this mean you can only make real money if you got in at the very beginning?
As a Canadian consultant working for US clients, I can assure you — the worst Cryptocurrency usability problems are better than the typical Canada/US wire transfer Banking experience.
The first time I sent a wire from US to Canada it bounced because I didn't include the street address of the branch where the recipient account was located. The mind boggles.
I was always wondering - virtually all money being electronic now, what the heck they are doing with all those branch addresses? I don't even have "branch address" - my account is just numbers, and if I need some live human service, I just walk into any random branch and they are happy to help me.
I sure hope there's not a server in the back of each branch holding account state...
(Now this reminds me of Katrina when local New Orleans banks lost their primary and backup data centers and took weeks to recover account balances.)
While I doubt there's a server in each branch managing account balances, there's is some kind of branch-related weirdness involved in bank account management at some banks.
With some banks, if you open a bank account at a branch in one time zone but later move to another time zone, your transactions will still be processed according to the business hours where the account was opened.
I know someone who is in this situation and they can't make transactions for several hours towards the end of the day (after midnight in the originating branch's timezone) because their bank's online banking front end can't agree with the bank's backend system about what day it is.
It's not dead, but it's not mainstream either. It's a bit like quidditch - there are a bunch of people interested in it, and they have their own ecosystem, but don't expect the Olympic Committee to be calling anytime soon.
OTOH, the regulators are getting quite serious in recognizing crypto - including reporting requirements and enforcement. The era where it was tiny enough the IRS basically didn't care except for tiny amount of outlier cases is gone.
Far from dead. It's been growing rapidly, particularly the decentralized finance (defi) space. Number of transactions has been steadily going up in Ethereum: https://etherscan.io/chart/tx
BTC is currently $11.5k USD, market cap $200 billion+. This is a valuable asset.
Yeah but like, what's it valuable for? It seems like commodity trading, except the commodity that is being traded is who gets stuck holding the bag when it all collapses. There's no real value there.
It's money not controlled by any single government or entity. It can be exchanged almost as easily as cash. If you don't see the use in that, then good for you, your needs must be met by the existing financial services.
Personally, I used it to buy electronics in Japan, worked well. Also used it to sell my VR headset in person, because Paypal and our banks didn't allow the transfer. I use it to tip and donate to various online creators with no fuss. It's really quite simple, no need to overthink it.
Sure, maybe one day the price will crash or the peg fail, but for most intents and purposes it works fine. Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month, or sifting through reddit WSB troll posts to know which stock to buy.
I've bought things with BTC (I believe I am rare insofar as I have never bought BTC but have spent them...) and having frequently used cash, I can assure you that spending BTC is not even remotely as easy as spending cash.
Digital gold is a better analogy for BTC than digital cash. As a value reserve BTC has a lot of desirable properties over gold (try moving $10m of gold around...). The fact that it's fairly easy to spend BTC is an additional positive point.
Yeah, but ever tried to spend (actual) cash online? Any way you try, you're going to need 2 banks and a payment processor involved. The buyer bank, the seller bank, and Visa, PayPal, or somebody.
In the end, something like 3-5 percent of what you spend is going to be redirected. These are real costs you pay.
Monitoring crypto prices and fundamentals is not so bad compared with traditional finance folks having to read through hundreds of all-caps tweets to know how much value the USD will lose this month,
No, you just have to worry about how much your crypto will change in value each day. Bitcoin's value changed by over 7% in just the past month, and in the past year has dropped in value by over 20% twice. That's so much better than worrying about the fraction of a percent in the monthly deltas for USD over the past several decades.
If you're worried about price fluctuations, sell Bitcoin futures against your holdings dated for when you need the USD?
You have the exact same problem with gold, which has increased 30% over the last few months.
It's "money" controlled by a few large electricity-wasting pools.
Still more efficient than the alternatives.
USD is controlled by an entity which spends $680 billion / year along with countless lives and 270k barrels of oil a day in order to defend it.
Gold dug out of the ground, then put in high tech vaults which must be similarly actively defended.
It's "money" that's not meaningfully exchangeable for goods or services. I can't buy a sandwich with it, or pay my taxes with it, or get my salary in it. Its only utility is that it can (for now) be turned into a large amount of fiat currency. Its only value proposition is that maybe that large amount will be an even larger amount in the future.
To put your argument in other words: it doesn't have enough adoption to be more useful than the current alternatives.
That has always been a caveat of new network-effect dependent technologies.
In the early days, the internet wasn't useful to communicate with other people. It was way easier to just call the person on their phone instead of hoping they had a particular messaging application installed on their PC and had it turned on when you were hoping to talk. Its only value propositions were downloading porn for free or finding communities of geeks, trolls and conspiracy theorists. It served those niches well though, and from there slowly grew to attract more and more people and usecases.
Every single one of those things is easier with the existing money system.
Except no, the exact reason I do/did these things with crypto is that I couldn't as easily do it with the existing infrastructure.
Buying at a Bitpay PoS in Japan is just scanning a QR code, instant confirmation (Wechat easy but even foreigners can use it). A P2P sale for a non-insignificant amount of money (~$1.5k): rejected by Paypal, inter-bank transfer would take days to go through. BTC was 5 minutes to wait for a confirmation. Donations through Patreon or other require you to sign-up, go through convoluted systems that sometimes require sending your identity documents, crypto is just copy an address/scan a QR code and confirm in your usual, familiar wallet.
> inter-bank transfer would take days to go through
In the UK bank transfers are practically instantaneous. It's nuts that the US is so far behind on this.
Good luck paying an Iranian mail-order shoemaker... It's not hypothetical: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-iranian-shoe-store-trade-sa...
(EDIT) Sorry for my rude reply. Your point about intra-national transfers stands.
There are fast bank transfers in my country too, but for some reason my buyer's bank application was buggy and would only allow a traditional transfer. And of course, you can't use an alternative, non-buggy, app with your bank account...
Each bitcoin transaction costs about $50 now. They're quite a bit more onerous to use than cash, thus people use "exchanges" which are controlled by for-profit private interests.
> Each bitcoin transaction costs about $50 now.
That's off by a factor of 18 even if you want it to be fast, according to https://bitcoinfees.earn.com
"The fastest and cheapest transaction fee is currently 110 satoshis/byte, shown in green at the top. For the median transaction size of 224 bytes, this results in a fee of 24,640 satoshis." = .0002464 BTC = $2.81
I just processed a bitcoin transaction and paid ~1.52 in fees. That was this morning.
It's kind of like asking what Tulip Bulbs are good for. There's a niche use case, but most people are just in it to make money by basically gambling.
>> Yeah but like, what's it valuable for?
It's a deflationary store of value.
What is Gold valuable for? It's a deflationary store of value (though it does inflate slightly so it's not as good as Bitcoin in that sense).
Deflationary stores of value are valuable.
It's the same reason why a battery is valuable if you have solar panels. It captures excess energy from the system and allows you to store it for later use when you actually need it (like at night when the sun doesn't shine).
When the Fed is printing tons of money, the sun shining... You don't know what to do with all that excess energy. You could buy more electrical appliances to consume that excess electricity (e.g. invest in that hot new startup), but you already have more of them than you know what to do with... You may as well store that excess energy to use later for a rainy day.
Not a fan of bitcoin here but apparently it helps Venezuelans survive the terrible ordeal they are going through, because they can actually buy stuffs with bitcoin ,get donations to buy food,... thus avoiding US sanctions.
Many things appear to be a valuable asset, right up until the moment they aren't. In mid-2000, Enron stock was a 'valuable asset.'
That said a lot of people have grown old waiting for the Bitcoin bubble to burst.
Yeah to be fair, Bitcoin recovered pretty well after the pandemic dump. I think the biggest threat to Bitcoin will be a technological failing.
At 72.61 terawatt-hours/year and an average electricity cost of 13.19 cents/kilowatt-hour, that's an asset that loses 9.6 billion per year. And if you ever stop wasting electricity, your bitcoin become less valuable.
I think there's a mistake here since crypto is not mined with average electricity. Nobody (at least not at scale) just puts a mining rig in an apartment in the middle of San Francisco. It's mined where it's cheap, so using average residential energy price is hugely misleading. That's like estimating the cost of making a car by summing up the prices of parts and labor at the car dealerships - that's not how the parts are actually procured when making a car!
> an average electricity cost of 13.19 cents/kilowatt-hour
Source? The link supplied uses 5 cents/kWh, which is also an assumption on their part that they do not explain either.
There are lots of reports of 'seasonal mining' occurring in China, where mining operations are occurring in areas with very cheap or completely free electric, generally because the costs of producing the electricity are fixed, rather than scaling up or down with demand (geothermal / hydro / other renewables).
I got that figure from Google, but it's the average residential rate and I guess you'd get the industrial rate for a large operation(my power company charges 5.95 cents for that).
Vast majority of crypto currency mining is done with excess green energy that would otherwise be rejected by the grid and wasted, as high as 78% by some estimates. https://medium.com/value-of-bitcoin/bitcoins-energy-consumpt...
Sorry but this reeks of nonsense to me. Even if true, surely the compute power could be used for protein folding or something actually useful instead of hashing bits only to throw the results away the majority of the time. Crypto needs to die.
Not all cryptocurrencies require a ton of electricity. Some, such as those based on Proof of Stake are extremely efficient and use very little electricity so it's not fair to disparage them all on that basis.
I was a Bitcoin skeptic for years so I understand this point of view. This point of view makes sense if you assume that the financial system works properly which is what the vast majority of people still assume.
The vast majority of people are wrong. The financial system doesn't work; it's easy to exploit. It's no coincidence that many cryptocurrency enthusiasts are hackers; they found vulnerabilities in the system and are exploiting it. In the context of our corrupt, dysfunctional system, the value is solid and price will always go up in the long run.
Corporations are also exploiting the financial system using many of the same tricks, but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable. It's the next phase in the evolution of corporate personhood; which was a horrible but very successful idea. It's all about reducing liability. Whatever financial instrument is best at reducing its liability will win.
You seem to be confusing two things - system working and system being un-exploitable. Example - it's pretty easy to shoplift in any of the retail shops. In fact, shoplifting happens all the time. Still, nobody would claim retail model doesn't work because people would just come and shoplift everything and nobody would pay and the retailer would go bust. What actually happens is that vast majority of people do not shoplift, and the retail system works and produces massive profits.
> but cryptocurrencies have the advantage of being completely faceless and totally unaccountable
Advantage, but also disadvantage. If a bank cheats you, you have options to complain to regulators, to the police, to the FBI, to you Congress representative finally. It won't work in all cases, but it's an option that's available to you. If a crypto scammer cheats you, well, nobody is accountable. For some people, it's a big issue, because it greatly increases the friction in transactions.
This is not true because the bank does cheat me. Has been cheating me for a decade but the police won't do anything about it. If I try to sue the Reserve Bank, the judge will dismiss my case without even hearing the evidence.
Also, politicians never answer my emails and I did try. I must be living on a different planet.
Don't forget anonymous payments. Lots of vendors selling legally questionable (or illegal) things only take cryptocurrencies. I see that as a huge boon for these industries, who would otherwise have to figure out credit card processing, bank transfers, or being repeatedly shut down by Paypal/Venmo/etc.
Not anonymous (mainstream creeptocurrencies are traceable by design!) but censorship resistant. Yes, this is the ONLY use case for the buttcoins.
The problem is that for every successful weed and nudes sale there's a million ransomware attacks, scam calls, and absolutely fraudulent "investments".
completely false, privacy coins command billions of dollars in market cap, Monero alone is currently worth 2.2 billion and will likely continue to grow.
Not quite, it still has one positive use case: buying drugs (and other similarly prohibited items) off the dark web.
And there remains plenty of interest in academia, there are still many fascinating areas of research in this space.
Newegg at least still accepts it. I believe Humble does as well, but I don't know that.
Yes but the _appetite_ for these scams is seemingly infinite, so crypto seems far from dead.
One data point: we're launching the NuCypher Ursula service on ethereum mainnet tonight at UTC midnight. So, quite far from dead in some people's minds. :-)
Theres people who use it for certain things, like PornHub just started accepting BTC payments.
But there has never been more institutional and high net worth interest in BTC than now as a value store and adoption for a global reserve currency (we can see this from the institutional gateway inflows). Some recent examples: Microstrategy invested $425 million in BTC over treasuries. Twitter bought $50 million the other week (and Jack Dorsey owns BTC personally). Paul Tudor Jones bought in with about 2% of his total assets. Its gaining traction in this area as a value store.
Wait, that sounds like fraud. The CEO of a company had the company he runs buy into a limited asset he also owns...
Gg society, the fact that we're talking this up like it's a good thing means most of us deserve to be poor af
It's only (potential) fraud if he doesn't disclose his stake as a potential conflict of interest.
I'm not suggesting that Twitter investing in BTC is or isn't a good thing, but the CEO having a personal stake should not prevent the company from investing if there's suitable expectation of positive returns for the business.
Sounds a little dramatic (especially since 50 million isnt moving the price single handedly). Also stock buybacks are essentially the same thing (if you were to call it a conflict of interest) and almost every company in existence does that.
You just talked about Twitter buying BTC as important news showing it's viability though... It's mostly a popularity/buzz game.
Also yeah, stock buybacks were illegal up until 1982 and since there legalization we've seen large trades in companies from R&D spending towards buyback spending...
I mentioned several noteworthy people and institutions making an investment to demonstrate a trend. "its mostly a popularity/buzz game" yeah thats how value networks work. From gold to cash to facebook.
Yeah, I don't think we're in disagreement. Buying a commodity personally, and then using an institution under your control to buy that commodity and create publicity/network effects is just great business (for personal enrichment). It probably isn't even illegal!
The idea that the financial system works seems to be a contradiction when you consider that cryptocurrencies (which exist within that system) have been performing extremely well for over a decade. If scams can thrive so well in our system (to the point of becoming worth hundreds of billions of dollars), then how do we know that the biggest corporations are not scams too? How do we know they're not all empty shells? Their earnings (P/E ratios) are very low... And on top of that, I would question the source and legitimacy of these modest earnings.
What kind of system allows scams of this scale to thrive for over a decade? What kind of system supports bailouts of big corporations every few years? Corruption of the media? Corruption of politics? I don't think any of these fit the description of a 'working system'.
EDIT And what kind of system supports downvoting (thus trying to censor) such a logical comment as this one?
Why are "crypto" people so willing to believe that "Elon Musk" is offering to double their money?
People who are desperate are easier to scam because they 'want to believe.' They're looking for miracles because they think that's all they could hope for. I think it's less a matter of crypto people being gullible and more a matter of desperate people being gullible and consequently becoming crypto people. Organized religions often target the same demographic for the same reason. Born-again preachers love reaching out to broken junkies and alcoholics.
I am also puzzled about the intersection of people savvy enough to own bitcoin and dumb enough to think musk is gonna give them free money.
Considering the conversations I overheard about "crypto" in 2018, I'm not entirely surprised. There's a lot of gullible people who bought Bitcoin or Ethereum expecting to get rich.
Are these scams hitting "crypto people" or noobs who buy some BTC just to get in on the scam? The gift card scams aren't targeting existing gift cards; they tell people to go out and buy gift cards.
Because it's almost plausible? He's an eccentric billionaire known for his erratic behavior. Maybe one day he really does decide to shower the masses with a paltry (for him) $100k of Bitcoin. "It's weird and tech-y, just like him!"
It's just a slight update on the Bill Gates chain-letter emails from the 90s.
In the last "doubling" scam I've seen a lot of people literally saying "I don't really believe it but the sum is low enough I'd send it anyway just to see what happens". Get a million of those, and you have some money. I personally don't understand what moves those people but I guess I have to recognize they exist.
So the new thing is that hacking bluecheck account basically gets official Twitter stamp of approval on anything on that twitter account. And since display name and bio can be easily changed, basically the only think bluecheck is confirming is that the handle at one time belonged to a real person. And if somebody chooses a "witty" handle which does not identify the person clearly, you won't even know which one.
Welcome to 2 years ago.
Can someone help me here, how do these alarmist articles pop up occassionally as if this hasn't been happening for years.
Why does my twitter experience, logged out, consistently show me the fake crypto scams as the first response to any public figure, with heavy activity and evolving responses, while others get to act like they've never seen this before and must warn everyone.
Any theories?
One theory I have is that most people actually falling for these don't talk about it. Similar to most scams, people just feel too dumb.
I'm seeing an increase in Youtube scams as well where 5k bitcoins are "given away". The video and content look very legit and casual content browsers are easily susceptible.
I didn't realize this was still going on. Saw one of these posts in like 2017 under the handle @elonmvsk. Sad it's still happening.
I observed something similar that began earlier this year. I wrote about it on the Tenable blog. They impersonate many of the people following Trump and engaging with his tweets, irrespective of party affiliation.
https://www.tenable.com/blog/cryptocurrency-scams-fake-givea...
Wow, amazing. I had no idea it was so prevalent. Thanks for writing this up!