This is a scam that has been going on for years that has adapted its techniques over time.
We used this botnet as a case study back in 2018 when doing analysis on finding Twitter bots at a large scale. You can find the paper here [0] - the cryptocurrency scam botnet starts on page 28. You can also find the talk here [1] where we go into a little more detail. In full irony, someone tried sharing our research on Twitter, and one of the bots replied to the thread trying to spread the scam.
It's very disappointing that Twitter has allowed this to go on for so long. The scam is so successful that it is now attached to pretty much every prominent tweet and drowns out actual replies.
All it really takes to solve this is better UI. This is costing some users money and making the experience worse for everyone. Sad that Twitter isn't willing to take this seriously.
Comments
This is a scam that has been going on for years that has adapted its techniques over time.
We used this botnet as a case study back in 2018 when doing analysis on finding Twitter bots at a large scale. You can find the paper here [0] - the cryptocurrency scam botnet starts on page 28. You can also find the talk here [1] where we go into a little more detail. In full irony, someone tried sharing our research on Twitter, and one of the bots replied to the thread trying to spread the scam.
[0] https://duo.com/assets/pdf/Duo-Labs-Dont-At-Me-Twitter-Bots....
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQsRg0VsYoo
It's very disappointing that Twitter has allowed this to go on for so long. The scam is so successful that it is now attached to pretty much every prominent tweet and drowns out actual replies.
All it really takes to solve this is better UI. This is costing some users money and making the experience worse for everyone. Sad that Twitter isn't willing to take this seriously.
Maybe Jack is running the scam as a hobby and doesnt want to kill nice side hobby to stack sats.