Crypto spams & bots plague internet, particularly Twitter

Pune: A report has suggested that crypto spams and bots have been plaguing the internet, and Twitter alone has seen a 1,374 per cent increase in spam volume during the last two years. The report was authored by crypto intelligence provider LunarCrush, The Indian Express (TIE) reported.

The LunarCrush report surfaces when Billionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk puts a hold on his USD44 billion deal to buy Twitter. The deal halted after a series of statements issued by Musk regarding bots, and the latest among them was nearly 20 per cent of users of Twitter are fake. Now, Musk has demanded more evidence to prove Twitter's claim that 5 per cent of users are spam or fake.

Musk had tweeted, "20% fake/spam accounts, while four times what Twitter claims, could be *much* higher. My offer was based on Twitter's SEC filings being accurate. Yesterday, Twitter's CEO publicly refused to show proof of <5%. This deal cannot move forward until he does."

TIE reports that crypto scammers are in full-fledged efforts to find creative ways to steal crypto assets from crypto wallets. They tag users in replies across hundreds of tweets, while hackers hijack verified and unverified accounts on Twitter to impersonate popular NFT projects, like Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC), Azukis, MoonBirds and OkayBears. They use it to steal users' crypto assets by driving them to phishing sites.

When Bots were originally made for detecting spam, it stepped up activity in the crypto sector. According to LunarCrush, bots and spam are the most prevalent ever. It states that spam has increased to nearly 4000 per cent since it started collecting crypto-specific social data in 2019. It calls spam "the fastest-growing metric out of all social metrics."

LunarCrush CEO Joe Vezzani said that for a Web2 platform like Twitter, there is a direct incentive to turn a blind eye to fake accounts because it increases the value of their platform, TIE reports.