Scam Alert: Someone Allegedly Impersonates Vitalik Buterin on Instagram, Pulling Off Crypto Scams

Approximately five hours ago, a Reddit user going by the name Nwa1g published a post, claiming that s/he has found a scammer who impersonates Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin on Instagram.

This person or a group of them allegedly “rope followers into classic crypto scams”.

Vitalik Buterin impersonated on Instagram

Redditor wrote about the “very dangerous disgusting scam” and asked the Ethereum community to upvote his post to get something done about the problem.

According to him, Vitalik Buterin does not have an official account on Instagram, and so the alleged scammer is taking advantage of it, using Vitalik’s Twitter handle name @vitalik.eth. This account has 643,000 followers.

Nwa1g also wrote that since there is no official account of Buterin on that social media platform, it is impossible to report the impersonator. However, there is a @buterin_official account on Instagram with 576,000 followers.

The fake account in question is based in Israel, the Redditor claims, and it posts “harmless sponsor ads on photos with Vitalik”. Curiously, the Reddit user states that this account has been on Instagram for over two years – since 2019.

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“They are stealing from people”

As per Nwa1g, the people behind the fraudulent account get its followers to send them direct messages (since they believe they are writing to Vitalik Buterin) and here’s when they become victims of classic cryptocurrency scams – send their seed phrases or coins to these scammers expecting to get 3x crypto in return. Users allegedly also receive malicious links from this account in DMs.

Multiple "Vitalik Buterin" accounts on Instagram

However, a simple search on Instagram shows that there are over a dozen “Vitalik Buterin” Instagram accounts with a bunch of them called “Vitalik Biterin_official”.