Following tech billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of the social media platform X (formally Twitter), his mission of eradicating malicious crypto-based projects from the platform has not been going so well. Or has it? A recent study by a member of the Crypto Twitter community reveals flaws in recent measures taken by the American billionaire.
Musk Gold Checkmark Inefficient
In October 2022, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion acquisition of X and assumed an administrative position in the company. One of his stated missions was to reduce the rise of fake and malicious accounts on the application.
Fast forward to late March, Musk, who served as Twitter CEO at the time, introduced the idea of a new premium plan for notable organizations to acquire a gold verification checkmark with a $1,000 fee per month. The tech billionaire stated that the high bar was set “to make it expensive for scammers to create millions of accounts.”
Although Musk’s action may have seemed logical, recent occurrences say otherwise. Bad market players have created a malicious black market where they buy gold-checked accounts to lure unsuspecting investors and rid them of their hard-earned money. ZachXBT, an on-chain sleuth and self-proclaimed blockchain detective, hinted that these scammers purchase these accounts from Telegram.
According to Zach, such gold-checked accounts are steadily on the rise. In the past two days alone, 12 such accounts have been identified on X. These social accounts disguise as reputable crypto firms and share phishing links to X users to engage with, making them lose their assets.
The on-chain detective has called the attention of X and its Premium checkmark issuing accounts to look into the matter. As a suggestion, Zach mentioned that the X “team needs to reevaluate how these accounts get approved.”
Other X users emphasize the damage these malicious accounts have on their victims. YazanXBT, an on-chain analyst, said:
“I’ve traced some of the drains that happen as a result of malicious links promoted using paid ads done by these verified organizations and it’s really sad to see that it’s often in the 5 figures until the accounts get taken down.”
Under the guise of verified accounts, these scammers continue to steal users’ assets.
