sun 21 August 2022 ▪ 21:00 ▪
5
min reading – per
There is no end to identity theft alerts on social networks. Vitalik Buterin and CZ have just revealed stunning data on the subject. Fake accounts and fake identities on Instagram and LinkedIn currently number in the thousands.
CZ and Vitalik Buterin warn about identity theft
At the beginning of the week, two icons of the crypto universe followed one another on Twitter in order to launch an alert on fake accounts associated with their project or their name.
On the day of August 14, the co-founder of Ethereum warned enthusiasts about the existence of 5,000 fake accounts in the name Vitalik Buterin. He who has never opened an account on Instagram made this announcement via the Blue Bird network.
« Regular reminder: all 5,000+ of my Instagram accounts are fake profiles and do not concern me. All the posts you find in the name of ‘Vitalik Buterin’ (or ‘Bütein’ or whatever) constitute a scam. »
The day after this publication, CZ also made a mea culpa via his official account.
« LinkedIn has 7,000 ’Binance employee” profiles, of which only about 50 are real. I wish LinkedIn had a function that allowed the company to verify people. So a lot of ‘hey, I’m in charge of the list’ scammers on LinkedIn. Be careful! »
Roughly speaking, LinkedIn is said to host about 6,950 spoof accounts displaying an affiliation with the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. The worst thing is that among the latter, there are a large number of scammers.
What are the consequences?
First, there is the proliferation of the crypto scam. An investor named Wilfred CEO also took advantage of Vitalik Buterin’s post to denounce his situation.
« In this way, I lost more than $7,000; he scammed me by telling me that he would discourage me from working on the ETH project. »
The Crypto Whale 2011 also confessed that he had lost 67.5 ETH via this fraudulent practice. He really would have liked Buterin to have advised the ETH community against it long before that date.
And then, he has this denunciation by CZ of the absence of a feature allowing identity verification on LinkedIn. Let’s not forget that recently, he set up DappBay, a device for monitoring the reliability of crypto projects.
As a reaction, LinkedIn recognized this vulnerable side and promised to take the necessary measures to block this kind of account as soon as they were created. To say that the company has already announced positive results in this direction last year. Its transparency report for the period from July to December indeed mentioned the blocking of 96% of all fake accounts on the network.
But this did not prevent the emergence of the 6,950 fake Binance employees on LinkedIn.
Note that Elon Musk has decided to postpone the takeover of Twitter for the same occasion. For him, the American social network has about 25% of spam accounts. This is strongly denied by the current Twitter administrators. In any case, the alerts to scams what Dogecoin and others keep doing remains valid. Investors to remain vigilant!
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