Twitter needs to act fast on fake account scammers

Twitter is an excellent source of up-to-the-minute crypto information, but fake accounts are an accident waiting to happen.

By now everyone most people who use Twitter will have seen the familiar scam. The scammer promises the mark that if he or she sends a small amount of a particular currency to a specific address then the mark will be given a substantially greater amount of said currency on the following day. Bot accounts will then pile in and "thank" the scammer for delivering on the promise. The trouble is that Twitter accounts in question are dressed up to look like legitimate accounts -- and gullible people abound. These scams are not terribly sophisticated and are relatively easy to detect, but what happens when they up the ante?

We have all seen the impact that a well-timed tweet can have. A well-timed bit of FUD from a doppelgänger account could be devastating. Twitter seems to have taken steps to verifying influential people in the crypto space, but one wonders if this will be enough. Perhaps something could be done to cryptographically verify profile images for certain accounts. All we can do is hope that Twitter puts a lid on this type of fraud before the scammers become more sophisticated.