okay so as some people don't seem to know this is happening:
when someone replies to one of your posts asking you for your paypal / venmo / etc, there are bots that will IMMEDIATELY clone your account and reply with a payment link. they block your account in the same second.
when someone replies to one of your posts asking you for your paypal / venmo / etc, there are bots that will IMMEDIATELY clone your account and reply with a payment link. they block your account in the same second.
because you're blocked, you'll see that there's 1 reply to that question but the reply tweet won't show up.
if you see a ghost reply to a comment like that, it's almost always a scam bot.
they delete as fast as they clone your account. you won't even know it happened.
if you see a ghost reply to a comment like that, it's almost always a scam bot.
they delete as fast as they clone your account. you won't even know it happened.
they will delete the reply tweet, but the account itself will usually not be deleted, just change the user name. so the accounts are usually not brand new, they even have followers. you need to check closely.
there are 2 things I ask everyone to do:
1. if you ask someone for payment info, check if the reply you get actually comes from their acc. the @ handles can be deceptively similar, check tweets and creation date.
2. if you see a ghost reply to a question like that, warn people.
1. if you ask someone for payment info, check if the reply you get actually comes from their acc. the @ handles can be deceptively similar, check tweets and creation date.
2. if you see a ghost reply to a question like that, warn people.
from what I can tell, these accounts change their details extremely quickly. often too fast to even report them.
this would be an easy thing for twitter to prevent for example by adding wait times or checking accounts for signs of cloning.
this would be an easy thing for twitter to prevent for example by adding wait times or checking accounts for signs of cloning.
i don't even expect anything better anymore. I've resigned myself to the fact that twitter doesn't fucking care if we get scammed. as long as it gets them ad revenue and "engagement", they're fine with it.
as proven by the fact that this problem is months if not years old.
as proven by the fact that this problem is months if not years old.
a failsafe option is to ask for payment info via DM only, or request they be sent to you via DM. with DM's, either you've got them closed so the scam bot can't send you any, or you've got them open and it'll show as a DM request rather than just appear in your inbox.
here's a website that converts a username into an ID. the ID cannot be changed, so this tool allows you to report these accounts through their ever changing usernames.
tweeterid.com
tweeterid.com
I see a lot of people trying out out in the comments. I don't know why it doesn't work. maybe there are simply not the same amount of these bots as they are for various other scams, plus I tend to get blocked by scammers for calling them out?
but there's enough people saying that this happened to them to show that this is a widespread problem. it happened to me personally before, so this time I knew what I was seeing.
it would be extremely easy to detect and prevent this behaviour, let's hope that @TwitterSupport finally does something about it... I would like for this warning to become obsolete
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