Outraged Ripple CEO Complains to Twitter, Here's What This Is About
Ripple Labs chief executive Brad Garlinghouse has taken to Twitter to complain to the support team about scam accounts that have been impersonating himself, as well as Ethereum co-founder and frontman Vitalik Buterin, and head of Binance CZ, among many other leaders of the cryptocurrency industry.
Garlinghouse has rebuked the Twitter team for being unable to distinguish the real profiles of crypto influencers from fake ones, adding that scammy accounts have been dwelling on Twitter for years. In the meantime, Ripple CTO has found a way to mark crypto scam tweets.
"I can't believe I'm still doing this"
In his tweet, Garilnghouse stated that scam Twitter accounts with a blue tick impersonate him (bearing his image) and are sending replies to numerous crypto tweets. He embarrassed the Twitter support team for being unable to distinguish between real accounts and fake ones.
As examples of other crypto leaders who have been impersonated by scammers, Garlinghouse named Vitalik Buterin and Changpeng Zhao (more frequently known as CZ of Binance exchange).
The Ripple chief tweeted a comment to his root tweet, adding that crypto scammers have been active on Twitter for years and the team has still not done anything about this, allowing these bad players to take advantage of "thousands, if not more" founders and/or CEOs of crypto platforms.
I can’t believe I’m still doing this – @TwitterSupport, it’s embarrassing when you can’t distinguish a real profile from a fake one. Verified scam accounts are now replying to tons of crypto tweets with my image, @VitalikButerin’s or @CZ_Binance’s. (watch it happen to this tweet) pic.twitter.com/wx9LzR75YR
— Brad Garlinghouse (@bgarlinghouse) October 3, 2022
Ripple CTO fighting crypto scams
In a tweet posted earlier today, chief technology officer of Ripple David Schwartz shared that he had thought of a method of identifying "outright scams" related to cryptocurrencies that often emerge in replies to his tweets.
Schwartz stated that his plan here is to use "hide [the] replies" feature offered by Twitter. If a reply is hidden, the CTO clarified, this means that he believes this particular reply to be a scam.
I'm going to start using Twitter's "hide replies" feature on outright scams. If you see a reply hidden, it is something that looks like a scam to me.
— 𝙳𝚊𝚟𝚒𝚍 𝚂𝚌𝚑𝚠𝚊𝚛𝚝𝚣 (@JoelKatz) October 4, 2022
"I see fewer spam bots": Doge co-founder
Over the weekend, as reported by U.Today, the co-founder of most popular meme coin DOGE, IT engineer Billy Markus tweeted that as of late he has been seeing fewer crypto spam bots in reply to his tweets, who write "Why isn't anyone talking about this?"
In previous times, he tweeted, he used to get roughly 200 replies from spam bots in the comments to his tweets and now he is getting, like, 20. He sarcastically assumed that either people have become more clever and do not believe spammers now or the cost of using these scam bots has risen dramatically. Another possible but rather unbelievable reason he names was that Twitter had actually done something about this problem.