In Friday’s edition of The Daily, Twitter has taken measures against crypto scammers imitating the profile of Tesla’s CEO Elon Musk and a Dutch court has sentenced the operators of the Coinvault ransomware. Also, crypto has been labeled as ‘junk’ by Mastercard CEO Ajay Banga, and Wirex has reported $2 million worth of XRP deposited to its crypto debit card after announcing support for ripple.
Twitter is trying a new strategy to address the issue with the numerous crypto scammers on the social network. The microblogging platform is now automatically locking any unverified account that changes its display name to Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and Spacex. Access to a blocked account can be restored only after passing a CAPTCHA test and providing a valid phone number, The Verge reported.
“As part of our continuing efforts to combat spam and malicious activity on our service, we’re testing new measures to challenge accounts that use terms commonly associated with spam campaigns. We are continually refining these detections based on changes in spammy activity,” a Twitter spokesperson commented. The company has declined to confirm if the policy is applied to other accounts.
The measure is meant to mainly combat the growing number of bots that are active on Twitter and imitate Musk’s profile to scam people by replying to his tweets. This means that once a user confirms the authenticity of their account according to the procedure, they can keep the display name as Elon Musk. Most scam bots operate by automatically replying to tweets from high profile figures, often promising giveaways or investment opportunities. Earlier this month, Elon Musk himself posted a comment showing that he is impressed with the skills of the scammers.