Early this morning, billionaire entrepreneur and CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, Elon Musk, reached out to Dogecoin (DOGE) creator Jackson Palmer for help in fighting cryptocurrency scammers on Twitter. As previously reported by Unhashed, there has been a growing trend in recent months of fraudsters impersonating celebrities using fake accounts, duping victims into sending cryptocurrency to private wallets. Palmer tweeted that he sent a script to Musk that is promised to solve the problem.
Scammer Hijack Celebrity Identities on Twitter
Celebrity-impersonating scambots were thrust into the forefront of public attention back in July after the identities of public personalities like Elon Musk, Vitalik Buterin and actor William Shatner were hijacked by fraudsters. The scambots use fake Twitter accounts to promote various money making schemes, often involving Ethereum.
I want to know who is running the Etherium scambots! Mad skillz …
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 8, 2018
Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin called out for Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to help fight against the scammers.
I do wish @elonmusk‘s first tweet about ethereum was about the tech rather than the twitter scambots……..@jack help us please? Or someone from the ETH community make a layer 2 scam filtering solution, please? https://t.co/biVRshZmne
— Vitalik “Not giving away ETH” Buterin (@VitalikButerin) July 9, 2018
Earlier that week actor William Shatner was also targeted.
BTW another fake me pushing a pump and dump crypto Ponzi scheme: @wiliiamshatners
— William Shatner (@WilliamShatner) July 2, 2018
Dogecoin Creator Provides Scam-Fighting Script to Elon Musk
As scambots on Twitter continue to plague the platform, Musk reached out to Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer for help.
“@ummjackson if you can help get rid of the annoying scam spammers, that would be much appreciated.”
-Elon Musk @elonmusk September 17, 2018
Palmer quickly offered to help by offering a script designed to protect Musk from scammers posting replies on his Twitter feed.
“If you DM me (your DMs aren’t open), I’ll send you the script – it’s short, simple and you just run it with cron somewhere.”
-Jackson Palmer @ummjackson September 17, 2018
Soon after, Palmer reported that the script had been delivered and implemented by Musk. As many already have, Palmer once again brought the issue of scambots to Jack Dorsey’s attention.
“Update: Elon has the script… we had a good chat on how @jack and the Twitter team should definitely automate and fix this problem on their end though.”
-Jackson Palmer @ummjackson September 17, 2018
At a Congressional hearing earlier this month focusing on Twitter’s transparency and accountability, Dorsey proposed that blockchain might be the solution to fighting misinformation and scams on the platform.
“Blockchain is one that I think has a lot of untapped potential, specifically around distributed trust and distributed enforcement potentially […] We haven’t gone as ep as we’d like just yet in understanding how we might apply this technology to the problems we’re facing at Twitter, but we do have people within the company thinking about it today.”
Research published in August by Duo Security revealed that there is a network of more than 15,000 scambots currently on Twitter.
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