🚨 EXPOSED: THE VOTE-FOR-ME SCAM (THREAD)

So this type of scam has been going around on X since the start of this year. I think it's time to properly break it down and explain how you can prevent being victimized.

Here's what happens: Nigerian scammers and hackers send you a DM where they ask you to vote for them to participate in a podcast hosted by Spotify and Google, and attach a link to the DM for you to supposedly vote. When clicked, the link will ask you to sign in with your X account.

By doing so, your login credentials - email or phone number, password, everything - gets sent straight to the Nigerian scammers. They then use these stolen credentials to hack into your account, and use it for further scamming: they send the exact same DM with the phishing links from your account.

So in the end, it has a kind of a snowball effect - the more people fall for it and practically hand their login information on a silver plate to Nigerian scammers, the more people get hacked and the more malicious DM's get sent.

Here are some examples of what the DM's typically look like:

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So of what benefit is it to the scammers?

This is what: it's not just a phishing scam, it's also a ransomware-type scam. The scammer asks for money in exchange for releasing the account. Like many other scam strategies, they also ask for WhatsApp numbers, with which they can hack you even further and potentially access sensitive private information.

(It's also worth noting that the scammer may want to use the hacked account for himself, or sell it to other scammers.)

Also - since so many of the victims appear to be pro-Israel accounts, Iranian hackers might also be involved in some way - just a theory, but very possible.

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