The Scam
A classic online bitcoin scam on Twitter is trending nowadays. And while anyone even halfway paying attention likely wouldn’t fall for it, the trick has already raked in thousands of dollars of ethereum and bitcoin in less than a week.
The Bait
The scheme itself is pretty straightforward: Attackers make Twitter handles that closely mimic the verified accounts of well-known figures like Elon Musk, John McAfee, or Ethereum cofounder Vitalik Buterin. Then they respond to one of those genuine tweets, giving the appearance of having started a thread, in which they claim that they’ll send a significant quantity of cryptocurrency (like 2 bitcoin) to anyone who sends a smaller amount of currency (like 0.02 bitcoin) to a particular wallet. Yup, that’s it. As of publication, you can see new attempts popping up on Twitter every few minutes.
The Twitter version, which started cropping up on February 1, doesn’t appear to be a total blockbuster, since most people know to avoid “send a little, get a lot” setups. (Not to mention that Elon Musk probably wouldn’t randomly give out a ton of bitcoin for no reason through Twitter. We think.) Still, many of the bitcoin and ethereum wallets the attackers set up do have a low key stream of payments coming in. For example, one wallet posted in a fake John McAfee tweet, which promised 20 bitcoin for every 0.02 received, racked up 0.184 bitcoin within hours. At current prices that’s about $1,500. Not a gold rush, but also not bad for a scam that takes so little effort.
Targets
“It’s all a statistics game. They aren’t targeting folks who need to be convinced, they’re targeting folks who will knee-jerk react,” says Tinker, a researcher from the Dallas Hackers Association who was early to spot the scam. “By lessening the length of the message, it makes the scam more consumable. Combine that with impersonating famous people sending out popular tweets and the fall of bitcoin—folks are desperate to get a gain on their loss.”
Proofs
Here are some of those gathered together by our Litecoin Founder, Charlie Lee
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