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Twitter Is on the Verge of Becoming a Haven for Scammers
I really didn’t want to write anything else about Twitter. I just plain don’t care.
Frankly, I’ve seen more articles about Twitter in the last week than I saw on the Senkaku Islands dispute during two agonizing years of waiting for our two largest trading partners to go to war. That’s pathetic.
But this is a little different. You see, the internet has become a very parochial place. It’s a natural consequence of having platforms with user bases that have very well-defined demographics. Twitter is for movers and shakers in the press, entertainment and politics, and there’s not much overlap between that group and heavy users of YouTube. This makes it easy to miss how what happens on Twitter can affect other platforms.
It started when I received a notification on Discord pointing me toward this:
So let me explain what’s going on here.
As you might be aware, the internet has turned into a sewer of fraud over the last few years. Maybe that’s because it’s harder to make honest money; maybe the environment is just right for it. I can’t speak to the origins, only the outcomes, and the end result is that we now find ourselves living in a golden age of scams.
One form of fraud that’s become very common over the last two years is the imitation scam. This is pretty much exactly what it sounds like: Somebody pretends to be another person in order to run some kind of grift on confused fans of said person.
On YouTube, the scammers have this down to a science. They create a throwaway account that resembles that of a popular creator, using the same avatar and a spoofed name. They then run a script on that creator’s video responding to comments en masse. The comments inevitably tell the prospective victim that he or she has won some contest, then directs the mark to an outside service (often Telegram) to receive the prize. Anyone who takes the bait is then targeted by any number of common scams.
