The Nisos report drives home a well-known concern from consumer protection watchdogs: social media platforms are a huge vector for cryptocurrency scams. Doing show makes it more likely that the quote tweets will be flagged for removal but not the primary tweet with the storefront link. He pointed out that it’s common for scammers to use secondary networks of accounts to quote-tweet the original tweet and spam users by tagging them, such was the case in the Nisos report. “This is pretty much standard fare from what I’ve seen,” Satnam Narang, a researcher at cybersecurity firm Tenable who has extensively studied cryptocurrency scams, said of the Nisos report. In May, Bloomberg reported on how scammers were hijacking some Twitter accounts to pose as popular NFT projects and push credential-stealing apps. The scam ring identified by researchers at Nisos is hardly an isolated incident. Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment. 11, but researchers confirmed that the network is still active on the platform as are many of the Twitter handles flagged in the report. Researchers couldn’t definitively say where the network originated, but all the accounts that produced the original tweets followed three Indonesia-based accounts. The report only covers research through Oct. In total, researchers found more than 500 domains used by the fraud network, all tied to a single IP address. For instance, researchers flagged the accounts and riffs on an NFT platform that has nearly half a million Twitter followers. Wallet addresses tied to scammers have “received hundreds of transactions ranging from tens to hundreds of dollars” since the scam begin, according to an analysis researchers did with the assistance of cryptocurrency tracing firm Chainalysis.įraudsters gained the trust of victims by using similar account names and profile pictures to the Twitter accounts of real NFT marketplaces. Researchers were unable to assess how much scammers bilked from their victims. Because NFTs are unique and unable to be recreated, they’ve gained value among collectors. NFTs, like bitcoin, are virtual assets that exist only on the blockchain. The fake NFT stores prompted victims to share access to their wallets under the guise of minting a new NFT, allowing scammers to deplete the owner’s collection of NFTs along with other virtual currency funds. Thousands of other bogus accounts amplified those tweets, according to researchers. 11 more than 3,000 Twitter accounts produced nearly 6,000 tweets linking to sham storefronts that offered to mint new NFTs - non-fungible token - for free. Researchers at the threat intelligence firm Nisos found that between July 26 and Oct. It also raises fresh questions about what Twitter is doing to rid its platform of fake accounts, which the company’s new owner, Elon Musk, vowed to get rid of or “die trying.” The report is just the latest indication that cryptocurrency-related scams still run rampant on social media despite continued warnings from consumer protection watchdogs. A fraud network made up of thousands of bogus Twitter accounts has been impersonating legitimate NFT stores to swindle users out of cryptocurrency, according to research published Thursday.
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