“Honey, I’m home—but the market’s crashed and we can’t afford to send the kids to college because my scam bots aren’t making any money.”—Says one ETH scammer to his wife.
That scam bots are on the run, instead of on the rise, might come as a surprise to Elon Musk. On Tuesday, the real world’s version of Iron Man asked the inventor of Dogecoin to help him combat the ETH scam bots that have been plaguing him since the summer. These bots inhabit fake accounts, mimicking prolific industry figures, and offer “crypto giveaways” in return for users sending over their hard-earned cryptocurrency.
Twitter has removed 70 million fake accounts during May and June alone. And a recent study found a large “botnet” of at least 15,000 bots behind just one ETH scam. The scams have so far tricked Sky News and TechCrunch, which fell for a scam bot-Elon Musk, who was supposedly giving away a Tesla. Even Quartz journalist Joon Ian Wong, who’s been covering this world since a bitcoin would barely be able to buy you a cup of coffee, was tricked by a fake account appearing to be journalist Kyle Torpey.
And yet, many crypto pundits are claiming the scam bots are posting less, not more frequently. Partly that’s because the market has utterly collapsed, and partly it’s because Twitter seems to be stepping up its evil bot eradication program.
“The market is so shot, even the ETH scams have given up!” says Ran NeuNer, host of CNBC’s CryptoTrader, on Twitter.
The CEO of crypto rumour magazine, The Crypto Profit, who remains anonymous, thanks Twitter for tackling the issue and says there are no more scam bots–although it’s not hard to find that some are still being published. Other users take aim at the falling price of ethereum and suggest that USDT might be better to scam with—or even Turkish Lira. One user is so happy, he celebrated by tipping crypto investor Chad Ross, who mentioned the lack of scams, with a whole 0.000001 BCH ($0.0005).
Has twitter lost the war of the bots or is Elon Musk just seeing things?
After taking some time out to smoke a joint with Joe Rogan, he’s checked his phone and found spam bots again commenting on his posts. Instead of proclaiming peace and love, he took to Twitter to fight the bots. He tapped Jackson Palmer, the creator of the gag currency, Dogecoin, to be his knight in shining armor.
Palmer ended up direct tweeting with Musk and provided him with a script to automatically fix the problem (though free giveaway comments can still be seen on some of his recent tweets.) And earlier today, he offered his services to Twitter, as well. "Fingers crossed," tweeted Palmer. Ours, too.