Crypto Twitter Bots Have Become Worse than Anyone Could Have Imagined

Cryptocurrency–One of the industry’s worst proponents is a pervasive, network of scam bots that has quickly come to litter the space of Twitter. While most social media users have become accustomed to the incessant “Ethereum giveaway” scams that adorn the profile of any crypto industry figure, the problem has begun to bleed over into other sectors of the internet. Elon Musk famously called out the bots earlier in the summer, when he made his first reference to Ethereum in the form of a tongue-in-cheek comment about the annoying extorters.

Today new research has been published by the cybersecurity firm Duo Security showing just how bad the problem of cryptocurrency scam bots has become on Twitter, revealing a network of at least 15,000 individual accounts. The researchers used machine learning to differentiate real and bot accounts, as well as classifying the scammers by their propensity towards cryptocurrency (often in the form of giveaway ploys). In all, the company…