Twitter Bitcoin Scams Take New Leap After Verified Twitter Accounts Impersonate Elon Musk

Scammers are capitalizing on Musk's Twitter social media prominence to spin out hopes of cryptocurrency returns - with gains even more spectacular than the famed 2017-bull run.

Moving a step ahead of the casual giveaway tweet, scammers are purchasing verified twitter accounts and pretending to be Musk.

The "Blue tick" purportedly draws confidence from gullible investors looking to make a quick buck, which ends up in thousands of dollars worth of Bitcoin transferred to accounts controlled by scammers.

While such scams have been running for months - often with slight variations reminiscent of "Nigerian prince" confidence stories - industry observers are slamming Twitter for its incompetence in preventing such widespread scams on its portal; especially those involving verified accounts and resulting in huge funds being siphoned from victims.

The fraud was first brought to light by a Reddit user, with comments mostly ranging from Twitter's inability to handle the influx of Bitcoin scams and the foolishness of investors falling for the apparent theft.

Simple as it may seem - internally flag similar looking messages and tweets sent by multiple accounts - cyber experts think the problem is more complicated than an anti-spam security script running on Twitter's backend.

Jordan Wright, a principal engineer at Duo Security, has conducted extensive research into Twitter bots in 2018 and concluded that scam accounts have hundreds of supporting handles which like, retweet, comment, and provide credibility to the scam tweet.

Twitter states protective measures are in place to prevent such misdoings.

Last week, Twitter temporarily banned the actual Elon Musk account after the entrepreneur joked about selling bitcoin.

The firm has started blocking all accounts named "Elon Musk" - with latter efforts failing to prevent misdeeds from verified accounts.