Adverts promoting crypto scams are appearing on X, formerly Twitter, amid an exodus of major brands from the platform.
Many of the scam ads use the likeness of Elon Musk, who bought Twitter for $44 billion last year, to promote fake cryptocurrency giveaways.
The scam ads work by promoting a fake pre-sale of “X Token”, which fraudulently offers early investors large profits if they buy the cryptocurrency before it officially launches on exchanges.
Some of the adverts seen by The Independent have even appeared on the profile page of Elon Musk, who has 165 million followers on X – more than any other user.
The scammers have paid for the sponsored posts, providing much-needed revenue for X as the company struggles with retaining traditional advertisers.
Over 100 brands and other advertisers have pulled their ads from X in recent weeks, according to internal documents seen by The New York Times, which could lead to losses of around $75 million in earnings this year.
The exodus reportedly began after Mr Musk engaged with a controversial tweet about an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The X owner responded to claims that he is antisemitic by saying “nothing could be further from the truth”.
Companies to have withdrawn ads include Airbnb, Apple, Coca-Cola, Disney, IBM, Netflix and Uber. X disputed the figure reported, claiming it “represented an internal exercise to evaluate total risk” and that the true figure was closer to $11 million.
The emergence of scam crypto ads has already resulted in significant financial losses for X users, according to the MalwareTips forum, with some victims reporting they lost their entire crypto savings.
“The anonymity of cryptocurrency enables the scammers to quickly withdraw funds without being tracked down,” a post to MalwareTips notes.
A twitter-hackers-cryptocurrency-a8620436.html">2018 investigation by The Independent found that crypto scams shared on Twitter had tricked people into sending hundreds of thousands of dollars to cyber criminals posing as Mr Musk.
Hackers were able to take over Twitter accounts belonging to verified brands like Matalan and Pantheon Books, before switching the name and profile picture in order to impersonate the tech entrepreneur. They then posted messages offering fake giveaways that required people to send cryptocurrency in order to verify their bitcoin address.
Analysis of the addresses found that more than 400 people sent bitcoin to one address, with transactions totalling 28.2 bitcoins ($1.1m at current exchange rates).
Mr Musk cited the cryptocurrency scam epidemic as one of the motivating reasons for his purchase of Twitter, pledging to fix the issue upon his takeover. “If our Twitter bid succeeds, we will defeat the spam bots or die trying,” he tweeted in April 2022.
In June 2022, Mr Musk also criticised YouTube for fake cryptocurrency promotions that featured on the platform. “YouTube seems to be nonstop scam ads,” he tweeted.
Efforts to defeat the bot endemic have included subscriptions and a $1 charge to new users, which was introduced in New Zealand and the Philippines last month. The “Not a Bot” subscription method is designed to “reduce spam, manipulation or our platform and bot activity,” the company said at the time.
It is not clear how this approach will prevent accounts from promoting crypto scams, with all of the ads seen in October and November coming from verified X accounts.
X did not respond to a request for comment from The Independent about the issue of crypto scam ads.
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