Anti-fraud software company MetaCert has a fix for the simplistic yet frequently effective rackets that have come to plague cryptocurrency’s online communities: Twitter scams.
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Cryptonite[2], as it’s playfully dubbed, is MetaCert’s solution to safeguard users from the fraudulent accounts that orchestrate fake giveaways under the guise of industry leaders. Typically, these accounts masquerade as the blockchain industry’s high-profile individuals. Within the Twitter statuses of the individuals in question, these fraudsters mimic verified accounts with picture-perfect doppelgängers, advertising giveaways that ask users to send cryptocurrencies, usually bitcoin or ether, to an address to receive a larger sum in return.
If you’ve ever glanced a verified Twitter handle for a popular industry figure that reads “Not giving ETH or BTC away,” these schemes are the reason.
Sometimes, these scams are easy to snuff out, especially if the individual being mimicked is verified by Twitter. But Twitter doesn’t verify everyone, especially not in an industry still so niche as crypto.
“How do you know the Twitter account is verified? How do you know it’s not a fake account or a bot that’s going to apply to legitimate messages in the crypto world?” Paul Walsh, CEO of MetaCert, told Bitcoin Magazine in an interview. “Those are the kind of questions we’re looking to answer.”
MetaCert’s answer is Cryptonite, a panacea for the unscrupulous practices Twitter can’t fend off on its own. As a browser ad-on, internet users can install Cryptonite on to Chrome, Firefox or Opera. Once active, Cryptonite will display a green shield for legitimate Twitter accounts to give users a green light for their authenticity. Fake accounts, on the other hand, will be blacklisted with a gray shield to warn users to stay away.
“We built [Cryptonite] because it’s impossible to stay on top
