Twitter finally shutting down ‘Elon Musk’ cryptocurrency scammers

Anyone who’s made the mistake of wading into the unfiltered cesspool of an Elon Musk tweet’s replies will have noticed how bad the crypto-currency scams have become in the last months. Any time Elon Musk tweets, a thousand dummy accounts with identical display names and similar-sounding handles pop up in the mentions, offering to give away an alt-coin crypto-currency like Ethereum. Like any good scam, there’s a catch: You have to send a trivial amount of a coin to a wallet to sign up, but taken in totality, those trivial amounts add up to some real income, all for one tweet with a scam account.

It seems like a simple problem to solve, but given Twitter’s historical difficulty with enforcing its own terms and conditions (you know, like banning actual Nazis), it’s not a surprise that the crypto scam has been running rampant for months. But for once, it seems like Twitter is doing something simple to fix an obvious problem.

According to a statement given to The…