Seeing potentially a few hundred of these scam Bitcoin bots using Elon as a promo code. Not sure if the tools still exist to get a good read on total numbers.
Came across this network after being tagged in one of their tweets. Interestingly, the account that tagged me links to a different url than the others which could indicate a larger network.
Remember when Elon declared bots on Twitter dead?
That was fun.
The bot plot thickens. Found this NFT account using the same "promo code". It has over 6,000 quote tweets. I think that's our network size (at least).
As for origin, I feel pretty comfortable saying this botnet is operated out of Myanmar. I've found four url's shared by accounts connected to the network via screenshots and direct links. Two (qanbytrade[.]com and coinstrivex[.]com) show a Myanmar connection in WhoIs data.
In searching through the text of the "about us" page of qanbytrade[.]com, I found 3 other domains possibly connected. Two inactive domains via Reddit posts warning of scams and one active domain "tantobit[.]com".
Looks like this group has been active for some time.
So far that's a total of 7 past/present domains in this scam network:
coinstrivex[.]com (found via botnet)
The trio:
(qanbytrade[.]com tanbytrade[.]com lanbytrade[.]com)
tantobit[.]com (ACTIVE - same 'About us' as QANBY)
The "Bitcoin Airdrop" scam botnet is currently active and tagging hundreds of accounts. Each tweet says "Check profile". Doing as the tweet says, I viewed a profile and found a new (and 8th) domain connected to this group, bitforgex[.]com.
The Bitforgex domain is a copy of Qanbytrade and follows the same naming style as one of the other previous domains, Coinstrivex, where we see two words followed by "x".
The WhoIs data shows a registrar named NiceNic LTD, a Hong Kong company with a reputation for hosting scams.
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CNN made a horrible journalistic choice, yes. That said, last month The Daily Beast platformed a conspiracy theorist who convinced the author that an AI-generated image of a boy was a picture of his young daughter.
The conspiracy theorist convinced the author that the his Daily Beast colleague, Will Sommer, was an agent of disinformation and shouldn't be able to review the piece. The author agreed.
3 weeks later Will Sommer left The Daily Beast.
Direct messages showed that the author knew his source was "a mess" but he proceeded anyway. He disregarded the source's multiple suspensions and countless documented instances of targeted harassment and doxing.
The article was a disgrace to the standards of ethical journalism.
On Apr 19, @nandoodles shared some information about an ad exchange called "Atlas5". It looked like the majority of their 8 employees used AI-Generated "StyleGAN" faces. I decided to do some digging.
🧵
The 99 accounts in this network have tweeted 14,600 times. 780 of those tweets contain media. All 780 are screenshots of fake tweets supposedly written by Elon Musk. But what's the motivation behind the fake tweets? Let's look. 1/
Here are the images. Elon Musk did not tweet any of these. Each of the 7 fake screenshots encourages users to google specific types of watches, they're apparently so great that you'd be thanking the fake Elon tweets "later".
DON'T GOOGLE THEM. I did it for you 🙂 2/
Googling leads you to two domains; "outerwatches[.]com" and "otcwatches[.]com". Both domains show warnings of a "disease vector" and "scam" on open. The latter of the two domains was blocked and had to be accessed via archive.
The people behind these networks of bot accounts recognize that StyleGAN faces give them the power to mass-generate accounts that appear authentic. A small SEO botnet seems harmless but this same tech has been used by mega corporations and int'l govt's for propaganda campaigns.
I know that I sound like a broken record, but we need to be educated on how to identify AI images en masse BEFORE the tech advances to the point of indistinction.
I'll include some recent examples of how this tech is being used in the next few tweets.
Thread: On May 20, Breitbart threw some red meat to its readership. Pure outrage-bait. The article inspired 8,000 comments, 1,400 of which on @disqus, I spent a couple of days reading and documenting the response to this article. Here's what I found. 1/ @slpng_giants
My focus was on the @disqus comment section. Disqus has a TOS for users and publishers called the "Basic Rules". First rule: "Hate speech and other forms of targeted and systematic harassment of people have no place on Disqus". Let's see how this goes. 2/ help.disqus.com/en/articles/17…
I began documenting a few days ago. The process takes some time and has to be done in small batches to preserve my sanity. 😅
The first thing that stuck out to me was the general tone of the most upvoted comments. I tweeted about it on May 22. 3/