Fake Elon Musk Account Verified By Twitter Promotes Crypto Giveaway Scam

Chef Tyler Florence Verified Twitter Account Hacked to Promote Elon Musk Crypto Giveaway Scam

Despite Twitter attempting to ban scammers and impersonators on its platform, one impersonator of Tesla Chairman and CEO Elon Musk managed to promote a crypto giveaway scam with a verified Twitter account.

Who is at @TylerFlorence and why is he pretending to be Elon Musk giving away bit coin. But needing one first to confirm the account? pic.twitter.com/eUoSg0VwEn

— Stuart🍸AC130⚠️ (@StuartAC130) October 11, 2018

The Tweet has since been deleted, but it prompted users to “sеnd frоm 0.2 to 5 BTC tо the address bеlow and gеt frоm 1 to 100 ВTC back!”

Most probably, Tyler Florence’s account seemed to hacked.

So he’s a chef, verified w/696k followers. Damn, I bet this dude got hack by some scammers. pic.twitter.com/PoQ7Dd8VJF

— Stuart🍸AC130⚠️ (@StuartAC130) October 11, 2018

This incident should particularly catch ones attention given that it involved a verified account but also that the scam information was circulated by way of a promoted tweet. Notably, promoted tweets are paid for and are generally used by advertisers to reach a wider audience than they normally would through their existing network of followers, taking advantage of search trends to boost performance and visibility.

Twitter has increasingly been facing criticisms for the prevalence of giveaway scams. In fact, Elon Musk’s identity has been used in the past by other would-be scammers hoping to leverage Musk's reputation in order to trick users into thinking that he is giving away cryptocurrency. He has been hacked once before on twitter as well as on Medium.com

Musk himself is aware of this. He solicited help from crypto-community members, including Dogecoin creator Jackson Palmer, in an effort to block the scam solicitations from his feed.

Earlier, Vitalik Buterin himself came to support Musk asking Twitter for a 2 step verification

I do wish @elonmusk's first tweet about ethereum was about the tech rather than the twitter scambots……..@jack help us please? Or someone from the ETH community make a layer 2 scam filtering solution, please? https://t.co/biVRshZmne

— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) July 9, 2018