Interview with a cryptocurrency scammer / Boing Boing

Adam Guerbuez is a cryptocurrency evangelist whose Youtube channel is full of videos promoting cryptocurrency trading; when he got a Twitter message from a scammer promising to send him free Ethereum coins, he asked the scammer if they could talk about the scam.

The scammer turns out to be a big fan of Guerbuez’s and was happy to do an interview, which makes for a fascinating read. Assuming the scammer is telling the truth (admittedly a big assumption!), the scam pulls in $50,000-$100,000/day, and has been impervious to Twitter’s effort to crack down on bots. There’s a security economics story here: if a scammer can make millions every month by probing and bypassing Twitter’s bot-detection system, they will be powerfully motivated to do so, and can throw a lot of resources at the problem. If Twitter’s assumption is that botmasters are petty grifters, astroturfers, and griefers who have much smaller financial stakes, then the measures they develop are…