Twitter witnessed 1374 per cent increase in crypto-spam volume
Crypto spams and bots have plagued the internet, revealed a new report crypto intelligence provider LunarCrush. For the crypto industry, Twitter is the go-to social media platform, and it is flooded with spam and bots. There has been an estimated 1,374 per cent increase in Twitter spam volume over the past two years, as per the company.
This report comes as Billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for $44 billion was put on hold earlier this month after Musk made a number of statements around this issue of bots, the latest being the claim about 20 per cent of users are fake, but he’s now insing on more evidence from Twitter to back its claims that only 5 per cent of users are spam or fake.
He wrote in a tweet, “20% fake/spam accounts, while 4 times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher. My offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter’s CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does.”
Cryptocurrency scammers are determined to find creative ways to gain access to crypto-wallets and steal digital assets. These cybercriminals tag users in replies across hundreds of tweets. Hackers hijack verified and unverified accounts on Twitter to impersonate popular NFT projects, including Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Azukis, MoonBirds and OkayBears, to steal users’ crypto assets driving them to phishing sites.Best of Express PremiumPremiumPremiumPremiumPremium
Bots were originally designed to detect spam, however, this digital scourge has ramped up activity in the crypto sector in a big way.
According to the company, bots and spam is big business and it is more prevalent than ever. Since LunarCrush started collecting crypto-specific social data in 2019, spam is currently at an all-time high. It is up almost 4,000 per cent in the last 2 years. The company calls it “the fastest-growing metric out of all social metrics.”
“For a Web2 platform like Twitter, there is a direct incentive to turn a blind eye to fake accounts because it increases the value of their platform,” LunarCrush CEO Joe Vezzani told Quantum Economics founder Matti Greenspan in his crypto newsletter.
