Thread by @jsrailton

Been seeing these replies everywhere?

It's happening because Musk can't stop bots.

Let me break it down what's going on with this spam. 1./

2/ Reply spammers fight a cat & mouse games with platforms like #Twitter.

One way they get spotted is by the platforms examining links.

If spammers hammer a platform by sending the same link in a thousands replies to the same scam site, it's not hard to spot & scale blocking.

3/ Remember spam emails w/misspellings, weird names, blocks of garbage text, mixtures of words & numbers etc?

These were all tactics to avoid spam filtering done by looking at each of these things for patterns.

Each new filtering strategy = new workarounds.

4/ These incessant Twitter replies are doing the equivalent of old school email scammers.

They want targets to get curious & greedy like "oh cool look here's a website with an account that already has a balance...let me just log in & get rich!"

Who falls for this? Well...

5/ People greedily typing in the site URL & "logging in" see a big account balance!

1.5 million dollars in USDT

They are instantly rich!

But to get it out? Well looks like you'll need to talk to the scammers.

& maybe sign up for the "VIP plan"

6/ Here's the thing. Platforms don't just look at the text & links of posts for evidence of spamming.

(Reports help too)

They scrutinize things like IP addresses & tech used for account creation & posting.

Enough signals of badness & you can scale up blocking.

7/ Speculation: anti-bot filtering that should happen before anyone can create an account or post... is failing.

So spam accounts are posting like crazy.

Then avoiding #Twitter's secondary defenses (e.g. text & URL filters) by mucking up their URLs to be less blatant.

8./ Reply spam is a numbers game.

Hope some users see a reply. (e.g. 14 views on a 60k tweet ain't great but...)

Eventually you get one user ready to go the whole way & get conned.

Even if 99.99999999% of us don't, there's still potential for ROI.

9/ Now, here's the thing. You have seen this reply spam for a while because the network has been up before.

Then #Twitter did some mass suspensions.

But the spammers figured out how to circumvent #Twitter.

Great thread on the last go-round👇👇

10/ Still with me this far down the reply #spam rabbit hole?

Here's an interview with a crypto spam scammer by @briankrebs.

Thanks @oxleyio for flagging!
krebsonsecurity.com/2023/05/interv…

11/ Reply scam is like opportunistic infections.

They proliferate when an immune system isn't working.

Just like #Twitter's anti-bot tech.

12/ Just *so many signals* #Twitter could use to stomp reply spam bot accounts.

Them just constantly showing up in our replies is the daily reminder of just how bad things are.