On April 4, Elon Musk, business magnate and owner of X (formerly Twitter), announced "a system purge of bots and trolls," assuring users of the popular social media platform that "X Corp will be tracing the people responsible and bringing the full force of the law to bear upon them."
The plan for a bot and troll-free Twitter Elon Musk announced last week was eagerly anticipated, especially by the cryptocurrency community. Cryptocurrency users frequently fall victim to continually evolving phishing scams, many of which aim to impersonate legitimate Web3 projects and crypto influencers.
Read also: Claims about Malicious Telegram Links with Automated Media Access Disavowed by App
One of the most deceptive scams targeting cryptocurrency users involves the purchase of accounts with gold checkmarks on the social media platform, which, according to X, are meant to "indicate that the account is an official organization account through Verified Organizations."
Unfortunately, cybercriminals have found ways to exploit this special labeling created by the X team to help users distinguish genuine account owners from impostors. Scammers using gold checkmarks are particularly adept at deceiving victims of exploits who are urgently seeking ways to recover lost funds, making them more susceptible to falling into the impersonation trap.
Despite the efforts the team is making to clean up Twitter as Elon Musk promised its users, it appears that bots are still actively posting on the platform. Just yesterday, Mikko Ohtamaa, co-founder at Trading Protocol, reported that "Mentioning MetaMask still triggers a bot message flood." Ohtamaa also shared screenshots of spam messages posted by bots in response to a brief tweet from X user Fedbef86 about the inability to use Firefox with cold wallets and MetaMask.
Meanwhile, X user Brazzknuckles stated that massive bot farms are still being used to post on X, not only by scammers but also by "big companies." As an example, Brazzknuckles shared a post by social media analyst MasteroftheTDS.
MasteroftheTDS observed that the team behind Alan Wake 2, a game associated with Sweet Baby Inc., opted to use Twitter bots to amplify the positive reception of its March 6 update. This update adjusted the official minimum system requirements to enable smoother gameplay on PCs. According to MasteroftheTDS, the update may have raised concerns within Remedy Entertainment about the game's potential success.
Read also: Crypto Phishing Thefts Soar to $71 Million in March, Affecting Amost 78,000 Victims
"To promote the game alongside the update, it appears that bots were deployed to commend the changes in system requirements, suggesting that the game could now run on their 'potato computers,'" MasteroftheTDS claimed, sharing multiple spam-like posts praising the update. Interestingly, all of these tweets were posted by Premium X accounts, distinguished by the special blue checkmark.
"The blue checkmark indicates that an account has an active subscription to X Premium and meets our eligibility criteria," X explains. The team behind the platform further adds, "These accounts may represent an individual or an organization" and do not need to "undergo a review to confirm that they meet the active, notable, and authentic criteria that were used in the previous process" if the checkmark was obtained through an X Premium subscription.
