Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
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Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
#2So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.
Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
#3So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.
Don't forget anonymous payments. Lots of vendors selling legally questionable (or illegal) things only take cryptocurrencies. I see that as a huge boon for these industries, who would otherwise have to figure out credit card processing, bank transfers, or being repeatedly shut down by Paypal/Venmo/etc.
Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
#4So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.
The cryptocurrency space is quite alive, and is thriving. As much as people like to hate on it, the whole space rife with engineering, social, and economic challenges that attract geeks. Unfortunately, it attracts a lot of scammers too.
Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
#5So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.
Not quite, it still has one positive use case: buying drugs (and other similarly prohibited items) off the dark web.
And there remains plenty of interest in academia, there are still many fascinating areas of research in this space.
Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
#6So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.
BTC is currently $11.5k USD, market cap $200 billion+. This is a valuable asset.
Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
#7So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.
BTC is currently $11.5k USD, market cap $200 billion+. This is a valuable asset.
Yeah but like, what's it valuable for? It seems like commodity trading, except the commodity that is being traded is who gets stuck holding the bag when it all collapses. There's no real value there.
Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
#8So cryptocurrency is dead, right? After some brief interest around the middle 2010s, where some vendors actually did accept it, they seem to have all revoked their support for it. All that it seems to be used for now is scams, ransomware, and pump-and-dump schemes.
> cryptocurrency is dead, right?
No, not quite. Total new investment into the space is falling. But it’s nowhere close to zero.
It will probably never totally die. Instead, like baseball cards or beanie babies, it will atrophy into obscurity.
There are enough people who have sunk enough into the project—financially, reputationally—that, barring a depression, it will continue to have backers for at least another few decades. As long as Tether doesn’t overplay its hand, prices should keep the illusion going. It’s a cautionary tale regarding the staying power of purposeless institutions.
Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
#9This 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....
Re: Crypto scammers piggybacking Trump’s Twitter, cloning Medium, stealing crypto
#10This has been going on for quite some time, and I would be embarrassed if I were a part of Twitter's engineering team.
From a technical standpoint these types of scam tweets should be easily identified as spam and the fact that they aren't is damning.