Twitter starts crackdown against crypto scammers

Looks like social network giants have started embracing the impact of cryptocurrencies on their platforms. Earlier this year, Facebook banned ads for crypto exchanges and revised advertisement policies for organizations offering financial services. And now, Twitter is looking forward to reducing the number of cryptocurrency scams on its platform.

Where the company doesn’t have a clear policy on ads promoting cryptos or ICOs, the company states that “We allow ads that don’t violate the Twitter Advertising rules”. Twitter only tends to block ads for products or services that are potentially unsafe or deceptive. And it also restricts ads which show misleading or deceptive claims, such as “get rich quick” offers, as reported by TechCrunch.

Meanwhile, Twitter is more concerned with a number of fake accounts who have impersonated Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, Elon Musk, or John McAfee. These scammers are using deceptive tactics like a slight mis-spelling of a username or use a similar avatar of the verified account, and ask their followers to send them a small amount of cryptocurrency to get a bigger amount back.

For instance, have a look at this tweet, where a person having a fake account of Vitalik Buterin, was asking people to send him Ethereum ETH.

Similarly, another fake account with the name of Elon Musk responded to SpaceX’s tweet by saying, “Just for today I’ve decided to give away 3000 ETH to my fans.”

Twitter is aware of these issues and might be planning to remove such accounts, as it said in a statement,

“We’re aware of this form of manipulation and are proactively implementing a number of signals to prevent these types of accounts from engaging with others in a deceptive manner.”

Meanwhile, cryptocurrencies are seeing a huge dip in prices after a warning by SEC that crypto exchanges must register themselves.