Elon Musk’s X Is Making Big Changes to Combat Crypto Scams

Elon Musk’s social media platform,

“We are in the process of implementing automatic locking and verification when a user posts about cryptocurrency for the first time in their account history,” Bier said. posted on Wednesday in response to a user who had been hacked days earlier. (Coincidentally, Bier replied to our former colleague Ben White, who was VP of Creator Strategy at Rug Rudio, Declutter‘s sister company.)

“This should remove 99% of the incentive, especially since Google is doing nothing to stop the phishing emails,” Bier added.

In other words, the new rollout could lock a profile and seek user authentication the first time a crypto post is posted out of the blue. In Bier’s eyes, this would likely deter malicious actors from taking over accounts just to promote crypto tokens.

Some financial scams, such as those promoting crypto tokens or donations and “fake X trademark” scams “rampant” on the platformsaid Beer. He also noted that a “community mention spam attack,” where many users are tagged in a post promoting a crypto token, should now also be blocked on the site.

Ironically, Bier’s comments about declining crypto fraud on the platform came just hours before a user posing as someone else fooled multiple news sources and individuals into believing that a nearly 200-year-old turtle named Jonathan had died — only to later promotes a Solana meme coin based on the world’s oldest land mammal.

Details on how the auto-locking of the account in the scenario would have happened if the feature had been implemented are not clear, but it may have raised red flags for consumers long before the hoax was debunked. Bier later indicated on X that the platform would detect meme coin activity without prior connections, especially with accounts with a significant number of followers.

“If you have more than 10,000 followers and you drop a meme coin without any prior connection to crypto, it’s always a hack,” he posted on Thursday.

A representative for X did not immediately respond Decode request more details on how the feature will examine the legitimacy of the crypto discourse from accounts posting about it for the first time.

X has one long history with malicious actors who have accessed accounts of former presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden, as well as Kanye West and now owner Musk, all to promote crypto scams.

In September the The company took legal action against some banned crypto scammers who tried to bribe their way back to the platform.