Celebrities are not giving out free bitcoins on Twitter

by Anthony Allen

If you’ve been at all involved in Bitcoin social circles, you’ll have been exposed to Bitcoin’s greatest nemesis — Scammers. Opportunists are tearing Bitcoin’s reputation to shreds by polluting the space with fraudulent promises of crypto giveaways. They take a number of forms but most are equally transparent and obvious. If it appears too good to be true, use the report buttons and help protect our community.

By taking an aggressive stance against scammers, and educating those among us who are new to Bitcoin, we can help combat the negative sentiments that keep showing up in the media. Remember, this was an attack on Twitter, a centralized company, not an attack on Bitcoin. By using a Trezor hardware wallet, you protect yourself from direct attacks on your funds, but even the security of a hardware wallet can’t stop you from voluntarily giving your money to a scammer. Always be wary of anyone making big promises, especially when it involves your finances.

Double or Nothing

There is a tendency among scammers to pick on vulnerable people who can easily be convinced that they have been blessed with a one-in-a-million jackpot. A simple way to do this has been to pose as a celebrity and declare that they are giving away Bitcoin or Ethereum as part of some benevolent initiative. But why use cryptocurrencies? Because the same aspects of Bitcoin that make it so much more capable than traditional fiat, such as the fact that your transactions can’t be undone, has made it a perfect currency for scammers.

In the hype of late 2017, these phishing posts plagued social media: every second or third reply to a post would feature the profile photo of one celebrity or another — Vitalik Buterin, perhaps, or Elon Musk, for whom it became so common that at one point any profile bearing his name was instantly suspended. These accounts would promise to double any amount of crypto sent to a particular address — a transparently fraudulent claim. Yet the fact that the accounts lacked the correct twitter handles or verified account checkmarks made little difference to the unlucky souls who saw a gift of a life-changing amount of money pop up on their feed.

The Twitter Hack

As Twitter’s team sought to provide smarter ways to pick up on these con artists, their number seemed to diminish and, nowadays, many giveaway posts are generally removed within a few hours, if not minutes. A combination of better policing and more savvy users was helping to all but extinguish the threat. Until Wednesday 16th July.

The hack on Twitter saw the accounts of scores of the world’s richest and most powerful people compromised. Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and companies such as Apple and Uber, were all at once suddenly offering to double any bitcoin amounts which were sent to them. What a deal, right?

The tactics were no different than before — target the hopeful, take their money, and disappear. The problem was that this time it was verified accounts, with their blue checkmarks, followed by millions of people, that were perpetrating the scam. The potential scope of the hack could have been catastrophic, had the hackers been a little more creative.

The facts appear to show that the Twitter attack was masterminded by a group of youths, who had the tools at their disposal but no idea what to do with them. If the owners of the 12-or-so stolen bitcoins had stopped to think about why they had to send money to the world’s richest man to get something in return, maybe they would realize that it was a scam. You should be wary if someone promises you money for free.

Some Notable Exceptions

There are a number of events from Bitcoin’s early history which could be said to undermine the premise of this article. People did get many many thousands of bitcoins for free back in the day but it is very unlikely to happen to you in 2020. There were faucets, where you could solve simple tasks such as Captchas in reward for ‘a few’ bitcoins — the first of these gave out as much as 5 bitcoins per solution. Meanwhile, charitable initiatives such as the Pineapple Fund have seen anonymous philanthropists donate tens of millions of dollars’ worth of Bitcoin to multiple charities and sometimes even individuals.

While faucets were an early way to onboard more people to Bitcoin, these days you might see people ‘tipping’ each other on social media, especially Reddit and Twitter. These are small crypto payments, usually facilitated by bots, which help show appreciation of a post or response. They are mostly worth very small amounts of money, and serve as an increasingly common means of spreading awareness of cryptocurrencies by sending them to people who are not yet involved in the space, encouraging them to claim the tip by setting up their first cryptocurrency wallet. It is still, however, good practice to check that the tipbot is legitimate before clicking on any links.

Another example of ‘free money’ can be demonstrated by the Bitcoin Cash hard fork in July 2017, where an attempt to create a new version of Bitcoin meant that anyone who owned some bitcoin subsequently now owned the same amount of Bitcoin Cash coins. The associated attack on Bitcoin’s legitimacy by backers of the new currency led to speculators forcing the price over four thousand dollars. This unexpected windfall for people who had held bitcoins led to an ongoing chapter in Bitcoin’s history, where further hard forks have tried to replicate the same effect, though less successfully.

Finally, during the aforementioned ICO hype, cryptocurrency ‘airdrops’ became popular for marketing a new coin. People who signed up for newsletters, followed social channels and made content for the project, were awarded with a handful of tokens per activity. In some cases, these coins soon ballooned to 100 times or more their initial valuation, but examples are few and far between, and much less likely to occur nowadays.

What can we Learn from Scammers?

The July Twitter hack became a talking point mainly because it seemed so underwhelming. The attempt to scam people out of a few thousand dollars rather than leverage account access for something much more sinister has led many people to think there was a greater conspiracy at play. For now, there have been no conclusive reports that seem to point to any deeper strategy, making it appear to be a bizarre smash-and-grab rather than a sophisticated attack on one of the world’s largest social networks.

Fortunately, this latest hack was largely ineffective, at least so it seems. But it points out an unwavering trend of phishing attacks that people continue to fall for, whether on Twitter, in Telegram groups, or even by email. To most of us, they are blindingly obvious — a nuisance more than anything — but there are vulnerable people who will lose money. As long as you are aware of what these scams look like, and you protect yourself from direct attacks by using a hardware wallet, your coins should be safe.

Platforms such as Twitter made some minor improvements over the years to help combat bots and scammers, and some worked for a short while, but they have clearly failed to deliver on promises they made in the past. The only sure way to protect yourself from phishing is through common sense. Just say no next time Elon slides into your DMs offering you thousands of dollars in Bitcoin.

In the early days, we were all more concerned about governments restricting our access to Bitcoin, or even criminalizing it. But the beauty of decentralization has kept it fairly immune to such threats, a prime example being China, where the majority of bitcoins are mined, despite financial institutions being banned from handling them. The battlefront is public trust. We need to protect one another, to educate everyone on good netiquette, and stop scammers from spreading a toxic image of Bitcoin.