Elon Musk’s X Is Making Big Changes to Combat Crypto Scams

Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (previously Twitter), is making adjustments to handle the feasibility of crypto scams which have lengthy proliferated on the platform, in line with posts from X Head of Product Nikita Bier. 

“We’re within the technique of implementing auto-locking and verification if a person posts about cryptocurrency for the primary time within the historical past of their account,” Bier posted Wednesday in response to a person who had been hacked days earlier. (Coincidentally, Bier was replying to our former colleague Ben White, who was VP of creator technique at Rug Rudio, Decrypt‘s sister firm.)

“This could kill 99% of the inducement, particularly since Google isn’t doing shit to cease the phishing emails,” Bier added. 

In different phrases, the brand new rollout could lock down a profile and search person authentication if it posted about crypto for the primary day out of the blue. In Bier’s eyes, this is able to seemingly dissuade malicious actors from taking up accounts simply to advertise crypto tokens. 

Some monetary scams, like these selling crypto tokens or donations and “faux X-trademarked” scams are “rampant” on the platform, in line with Bier. He additionally famous {that a} “group point out spam assault,” one the place many customers are tagged in a publish that promotes a crypto token, also needs to now be blocked on the positioning. 

Satirically, Bier’s feedback about diminishing crypto scams on the platform got here simply hours earlier than a person pretending to be another person duped a number of information shops and people into believing {that a} almost 200-year-old tortoise named Jonathan had died—solely to later promote a Solana meme coin based mostly on the world’s oldest land mammal. 

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Specifics about how the account auto-locking would have transpired within the state of affairs had the function been applied usually are not clear, however it could have signaled crimson flags to shoppers lengthy earlier than the hoax was debunked. Bier later indicated on X that the platform would detect meme coin actions with none prior connections, particularly with accounts which have a big variety of followers. 

“When you have greater than 10K followers and also you drop a meme coin with none prior connection to crypto, it’s at all times a hack,” he posted on Thursday.

A consultant for X didn’t instantly reply to Decrypt’s request for extra specifics about how the function will vet the legitimacy of crypto discourse from accounts posting about it for the primary time. 

X has a lengthy historical past with malicious actors who’ve gained entry to accounts belonging to former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, in addition to Kanye West and now-owner Musk, all to advertise crypto scams. 

In September, the agency took authorized motion towards some banned crypto scammers who had been making an attempt to bribe their method again onto the platform.