Identity theft alerts on social networks are endless. Vitalik Buterin and CZ have just revealed stunning data on the subject. Fake accounts and fake identities on Instagram and LinkedIn currently number in the thousands.
CZ and Vitalik Buterin warn about identity theft
At the beginning of the week, two icons of the crypto universe followed one another on Twitter to issue an alert on fake accounts associated with their project or their name.
On August 14, the co-founder of Ethereum warned enthusiasts of the existence of 5,000 fake accounts in the name of Vitalik Buterin. He, who has never opened an account on Instagram, made this announcement via the Blue Bird network.
” Regular reminder: all 5,000+ of my Instagram accounts are fake profiles and do not relate to me. All the posts you will find under the name of ‘Vitalik Buterin’ (or ‘Bütein’ or whatever) constitute a scam. »
The day after this publication, CZ also made a mea culpa via his official account.
“ LinkedIn has 7,000 profiles of ‘Binance employees’, of which only about 50 are real. I wish LinkedIn had a feature where the company could verify people. So many ‘hey, I’m a list manager’ scammers on LinkedIn. Be careful ! »
Basically, LinkedIn is said to host around 6,950 impersonator accounts displaying an affiliation with the Binance cryptocurrency exchange. The worst thing is that among the latter, there are a large number of scammers.
What are the consequences ?
First, there is the proliferation of the crypto scam. An investor named Wilfred CEO also took advantage of Vitalik Buterin’s post to denounce his situation.
” I lost over $7,000 this way; he scammed me saying he would discourage me from working on the ETH project. »
The Crypto Whale 2011 also confessed that he lost 67.5 ETH through this fraudulent practice. He really wished Buterin had advised against the ETH community long before then.
And then there’s this denunciation by CZ of the lack of identity verification functionality on LinkedIn. Let’s not forget that recently he set up DappBay, a device for monitoring the reliability of crypto projects.
As a reaction, LinkedIn recognized this vulnerable side and promised to take the necessary measures to block this type of account as soon as they are created. To say that the company has already announced positive results in this direction last year. His transparency report for the period from July to December indeed mentioned the blocking of 96% of all fake accounts on the network.
But that hasn’t stopped the 6,950 fake Binance employees from emerging on LinkedIn.
Note that Elon Musk has decided to postpone the takeover of Twitter for the same occasion. For him, the American social network has about 25% spam accounts. What the current administrators of Twitter strongly denied. In any case, the alerts to scams that Dogecoin and others keep doing remain valid. Investors to be vigilant!
Receive a digest of news in the world of cryptocurrencies by subscribing to our new daily and weekly newsletter service so you don’t miss any of the essential Tremplin.io!
