Scam artists are using fake Twitter accounts impersonating celebrities and public figures to promote cryptocurrencies – then sell the coins at a big profit when their fake tweets pump the price higher.
As members of the cryptocurrency community look to curb fraud and exploitation in the emerging community, Harry Denley has come up with a rather old-school solution: JavaScript.
Denley’s script, EtherSecurityLookup, runs as a browser extension on Google Chrome.
The extension catches Twitter accounts that impersonate established users or companies. In the crypto community, this is usually done to plug fraudulent projects, or just straight up ask strangers to send them money.
In some cases, the fraudsters often promote a specific cryptocurrency, and then sell their personal stashes once their false endorsements send the price skyrocketing. In others, they create a fake company and raise money for a fraudulent initial coin offering (ICO), before disappearing.
The browser extension, which Denley plans to publish here on Sunday, is related to his existing EtherAddressLookup extension, which protects users from sharing their cryptocurrency passwords and addresses with scammers and phishers by checking domain names against a blacklist of websites. This is to hedge against so-called phishing attacks, where false e-mails attempt to trick users into parting with their cryptocurrency.
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